Full text of "Reminiscences of Oxford"

See other formats

REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 




I 






REMINISCENCES OF 
OXFORD 



BY THE 

REV. W. TUCKWELL, M.A. 

LATE FELLOW OF NEW COLLEGE 

AUTHOR OF "TONGUES IN TREES," "WINCHESTER FIFTY YEARS AGO, 
"REMINISCENCES OF A RADICAL PARSON," ETC. ETC. 



WITH 16 ILLUSTRATIONS 



SECOND EDITION 



NEW YORK 
E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 

31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 
1908 



O Thought, that wrote all that I met, 

And in the tresorie it set 

Of my braine, now shall men see 

If any vertue in thee bee. 

Now kith thy engine and thy might. 

CHAUCER, House of Fame, ii. 18. 



PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 



PREFACE 

ICH of the additional matter in this Edition has 
appeared at different times in the Oxford Magazine. 
Extracts are also inserted, by kind permission of 
the Editor, from some of my Oxford Articles in the 
Athenceum. Fresh chapters are given to Trinity 
and Corpus. Names newly introduced are those 
of Baden Powell, Hungerford Pollen, T. H. Green, 
Hext of Corpus, Monsignor Patterson, Henry Coxe, 
Vaughan Thomas, Meyrick of Trinity, F. D. Maurice, 
Dean Lake, Archbishop Temple, Isaac Williams, 
Warden Sewell of New College, " Tommy " Short. 
The notices of Pusey, Newman, Sir H. Acland, 
Provost Hawkins, Mark Pattison, are enlarged. 
The brilliant squib of 1849, called "The Grand 
University Logic Stakes," now very scarce, appears, 
with a Notuiarum Spidlegium, in the Appendix. 



55140 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. OXFORD IN THE THIRTIES I 

II. ORIGINAL CHARACTERS II 

III. PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 32 

IV. SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 45 

V. AESCULAPIUS IN THE THIRTIES .... 62 

VI. CALLIOPE IN THE THIRTIES 71 

VII. UNDERGRADUATES IN THE THIRTIES ... 83 

VIII. MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES . . . .104 

IX. SUMMA PAPAVERUM CAPITA. CHRISTCHURCH . 122 

X. MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE . . . .158 

XI. ORIEL 179 

XII. BALLIOL 200 

XIII. TRINITY 223 

XIV. CORPUS . . . 239 

XV. PATTISON MAURICE THOMSON GOULBURN 

SEWELL . . . ... . . .252 

XVI. WALK ABOUT ZION 282 

APPENDICES 299 

INDEX 339 



vii 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

1. The Vice-Chancellor entering St. Mary's. The "Vice," Dr. 

Cotton, Provost of Worcester, is followed by his Pro-Vice- 
Chancellor Plumptre, Master of University, and "Ben" 
Symons, Warden of Wadham. Photographed by Mrs. Frieda 
Girdlestone from a coloured drawing by the Rev. T. Woollam 
Smith Frontispiece 

2. " Horse" Kett, from a portrait by Dighton . To face page 15 

3. Dr. Daubeny, from a photograph, 1860 . 33 

4. Dr. Buckland. The Ansdell portrait. Repro- 

duced from Mrs. Gordon's " Life of Buckland," 
by kind permission of the authoress and of the 
publisher, Mr. John Murray . . . . ,, 41 

5. Woodward, architect of the Museum. From a 

contemporary photograph .... 51 

6. Huxley, from a photograph taken at the Meeting 

of the British Association, 1860 ... ,, 55 

7. Tuckwell, from a water-colour drawing, 1883 . ,, 65 

8. Charles Wordsworth, from Richmond's portrait . ,, 87 

9. Pusey, from a pen-and-ink drawing of the 

Thirties, photographed by Mrs. Girdlestone . ,, 132 

10. Sir Frederick Ouseley, from a photograph about 

1856 ,,148 

11. Dr. Routh, from Pickersgill's portrait . . . 159 

12. J. H. Newman, from a pen-and-ink drawing 

1841, photographed by Mrs. Girdlestone . . 182 

13. Mark Pattison, from a portrait in the possession 

of Miss Stirke 252 

14. John Gutch, engraved from a water-colour 

belonging to the family ,, 289 

15. Mother Louse, from the line engraving after 

Loggan ,,290 

1 6. Mother Goose, from a coloured lithograph by 

Dighton 292 



REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

CHAPTER I 

OXFORD IN THE THIRTIES 



" KO.I fj.T)v, fy 5' ycb, & K^iaXe, %af/)W ye dia\ey6fji.evos T<KS 
ff(f>6dpa 7iy>e<r/3urcuj." " To tell you the truth, Cephalus, I 
rejoice in conversing with very old persons" PLATO, 
Republic, A. ii. 

The Thirties The Approach to Oxford Coaching Celebrities The 
Common Rooms Then and Now The Lost Art of Conver- 
sation Beaux Esprits and Belles Marshall Hacker Miss 
Horseman. 

THE evening of a prolonged life has its compen- 
sations and its duties. It has its compensations : 
the Elder, who, reverend like Shakespeare's Nestor 
for his outstretched life, has attained through old 
experience something of prophetic strain, reaps 
keen enjoyment from his personal familiarity with 
the days of yore, known to those around him 
roughly from the page of history or not at all. 
It has its duties : to hand on and to depict with 
the fascinating touch of first-hand recollection the 
incidents and action, the characteristics and the 
scenery, of that vanished past, which in the retired 
actor's memory still survives, but must scatter like 
the Sybil's leaves should he pass off the stage un- 
communicative and unrecording. 

A 



*i ; - ' REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

The nineteenth century, in the second intention 
of the term, opens with the Thirties ; its first two 
decades belong to and conclude an earlier epoch. 
The Thirties saw the birth of railroads and of the 
penny post ; they invented lucifer matches ; they 
witnessed Parliamentary and Municipal reform, the 
new Poor Law, the opening of London University ; 
they hailed the accession of Victoria ; in them 
Charles Dickens, Tennyson, Keble, Browning, John 
Henry Newman, began variously to influence the 
world ; while with Scott, Crabbe, Coleridge, Lamb, 
Southey, all but a few patriarchs of the older 
school of literature passed away. Men now 
alive who were born, like myself, in the reign of 
George IV., recall and can describe an England 
as different from the England of our present 
century as monarchic France under the Capets 
differed from republican France to-day. Nowhere 
was the breach with the past more sundering 
than in Oxford. The University over which the 
Duke of Wellington was installed as Chancellor in 
1834 owned undissolved continuity with the Oxford 
of Addison, Thomas Hearne, the Wartons, Bishop 
Lowth ; the seeds of the changes which awaited it 
of Church movements, Museums and Art Galleries, 
Local Examinations, Science Degrees, Extension 
Lectures, Women's Colleges germinating unsus- 
pected while the old warrior was emitting his 
genial false quantities in the Theatre, were to begin 
their transforming growth before the period which 
he adorned had found its close. The Oxford, then, 
of the Thirties, its scenery and habits, its humours 
and its characters, its gossip and its wit, shall be 



OXFORD IN THE THIRTIES 3 

first among the dry bones in the valley of forget- 
fulness which I will try to clothe with flesh. 

It was said in those days that the approach to 
Oxford by the Henley Road was the most beautiful 
in the world. Soon after passing Littlemore you 
came in sight of, and did not lose again, the sweet 
city with its dreaming spires, driven along a road 
now crowded and obscured with dwellings, open 
then to cornfields on the right, to uninclosed 
meadows on the left, with an unbroken view of 
the long line of towers, rising out of foliage less 
high and veiling than after seventy more years 
of growth to-day. At once, without suburban 
interval, you entered the finest quarter of the 
town, rolling under Magdalen Tower, and past 
the Magdalen elms, then in full unmutilated luxu- 
riance, till the exquisite curves of the High Street 
opened on you, as you drew up at the Angel, or 
passed on to the Mitre and the Star. Along that 
road, or into Oxford by the St. Giles's entrance, 
lumbered at midnight Pickford's vast waggons with 
their six musically belled horses ; sped stage-coaches 
all day long Tantivy, Defiance, Rival, Regulator, 
Mazeppa, Telegraph, Rocket, " a fast coach, which 
performed the journey from Oxford to Birmingham 
in seven hours," Dart, Magnet, Blenheim, and 
some thirty more ; heaped high with ponderous 
luggage and with cloaked passengers, thickly hung 
at Christmas time with turkeys, with pheasants in 
October ; their guards, picked buglers, sending be- 
fore them as they passed Magdalen Bridge the 
now forgotten strains of " Brignall Banks," "The 
Troubadour," "I'd be a Butterfly," "The Maid 



4 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

of Llangollen/' or " Begone, Dull care " ; on the 
box their queer old purple - faced many - caped 
drivers Cheeseman, Steevens, Fowles, Charles 
Homes, Jack Adams, and Black Will. This last 
jehu, spending three nights of the week in Ox- 
ford, four in London, maintained in both a home, 
presided over by two several wives, with each of 
whom he had gone through the marriage cere- 
mony ; and had for many years so distant was 
Oxford then from London kept each partner igno- 
rant of her sister's existence. The story came out 
at last ; but the wives seem not to have objected, 
and it was the business of no one else ; indeed, 
had he been indicted for bigamy, no Oxford jury 
could have been found to convict Black Will. 

The coaches were horsed by Richard Costar, as 
great an original as any of his men ; he lived in 
his picturesque house on the Cherwell, now con- 
verted into Magdalen School, just opposite Mag- 
dalen Turnpike, having two entrance gates, one 
on each side of the pike, so that he could always 
elude payment. I remember standing within his 
railings to see the procession of royal carriages 
which brought Queen Adelaide to Oxford in 1835. 
She drove about in semi-state, attending New Col- 
lege and Magdalen Chapels, lunching at Queen's, 
and holding a court at the Angel. Opposite to her 
in the carriage sat always the Duke of Wellington 
in his gold-tasselled cap, more cheered and re- 
garded than the quiet, plain-looking, spotty-faced 
Queen. The Mayor of Oxford was an old Mr. 
Wootten, brewer, banker, and farmer, dressed 
always in blue brass-buttoned coat, cords, top- 



OXFORD IN THE THIRTIES 5 

boots, and powdered hair. He was told that he 
must pay his respects to the Queen ; so he drove 
to the Angel in his wonderful one-horse-chaise, 
a vehicle in which Mr. and Mrs. Bubb might 
have made their historic jaunt to Brighton, and 
was introduced to her Majesty by the Chamber- 
lain, Lord Howe. She held out her hand to be 
kissed : the Mayor shook it heartily, with the saluta- 
tion : " How d'ye do, marm ; how's the King ? " 
I saw Queen Victoria two years afterwards pro- 
claimed at Carfax ; and in the general election of 
1837 I witnessed from the windows of Dr. Rowley, 
Master of University, the chairing of the successful 
candidates, Donald Maclean of Balliol, and William 
Erie of New College, afterwards Chief Justice of 
the Common Pleas. Erie rode in a fine open 
carriage with four white horses ; Maclean was 
borne aloft, as was the custom, in a chair on four 
men's shoulders. Just as he passed University, I 
saw a man beneath me in the crowd fling at him 
a large stone. Maclean, a cricketer and athlete, 
saw it coming, caught it, dropped it, and took off 
his hat to the man, who disappeared from view in 
the onset made upon him by the mob ; and, as 
Bunyan says of Neighbour Pliable, I saw him no 
more. Maclean was a very handsome man, owing 
his election, it was said, to his popularity among 
the wives of the electors ; he died insolvent and in 
great poverty some years afterwards. 

The University life was not without its brilliant 
social side. The Heads of Houses, with their 
families, formed a class apart, exchanging solemn 
dinners and consuming vasty deeps of port ; but 



6 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

the abler resident Fellows, the younger Professors, 
and one or two notable outsiders, made up con- 
vivial sets, with whose wit, fun, frolic, there is no 
Comparison in modern Oxford. The Common 
f Rooms to-day, as I am informed, are swamped 
by shop ; while general society, infinitely extended 
by the abolition of College celibacy, is correspond- 
ingly diluted. Tutors and Professors are choked 
with distinctions and redundant with educational 
activity ; they lecture, they write, they edit, they 
investigate, they athleticise, they are scientific or 
theological or historical or linguistic ; they fulfil 
presumably some wise end or ends. But one 
accomplishment of their forefathers has perished 
from among them they no longer talk: the 
Ciceronian ideal of conversation, a-TrovSatov ovSev, 
<f>i\6\o<ya multa, "Not a word on shop, much on 
literature," has perished from among them. In 
the Thirties, conversation was a fine art, a claim 
to social distinction : choice sprouts of the brain, 
epigram, anecdote, metaphor, now nursed care- 
fully for the printer, were joyously lavished on 
one another by the men and women of those 
bibulous, pleasant days, who equipped themselves 
at leisure for the wit combats each late supper- 
party provoked, following on the piquet, quadrille, 
or whist, which was the serious business of 
the evening. Their talk ranged wide ; their 
scholarship was not technical but monumental ; 
they were no philologists, but they knew their 
authors their authors, not classical only, but of 
mediaeval, renaissant, modern, Europe. I re- 
member how Christopher Erie, eccentric Fellow 



OXFORD IN THE THIRTIES 7 

of New College, warmed with more than ones 
glass of ruby Carbonel, would pour out yEschylus, 
Horace, Dante, by the yard. Staid Hammond of 
Merton, son to Canning's secretary and biographer, 
knew his Pope by heart, quoting him effectively 
and to the point. Edward Greswell of Corpus, 
whose quaint figure strode the streets always with 
stick in one hand and umbrella in the other, 
was a walking library of Greek and Latin inscrip- 
tions. 

A select few ladies, frank spinsters and jovial 
matrons, added to the charm of these conviviali- 
ties. Attired in short silk dresses for Queen 
Addy, as Lady Granville calls her, was proud of 
her foot and ankle sandal-shoes, lace tippets, hair 
dressed in crisp or flowing curls, they took their 
part in whist or at quadrille, this last a game I fear 
forgotten now, bearing their full share in the Attic 
supper-table till their sedan-chairs came to carry 
them away. There was gay old Mrs. Neve, belle 
of Oxford in her prime, living a widow now in 
Beam Hall, opposite Merton, with seven card- 
tables laid out sometimes in her not spacious 
drawing-room. Mrs. Foulkes, whose husband, the 
Principal of Jesus, walked the High Street always- 
upon St. David's day with a large leek fastened in 
the tassel of his cap, piqued herself on the style 
and quality of her dress. She had a rival in Mrs. 
Pearse, a handsome widow living in St. Giles' ; by 
the aid of Miss Boxall, the fashionable milliner, 
they vied with one another like Brunetta and 
Phyllis in the Spectator. Famous, not for dress, 
but for audacity and wit, was Rachel Burton, 



8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

"Jack" Burton as she was called, daughter to a 
Canon of Christchurch, whose flirtations with old 
Blucher, on the visit of the allied sovereigns, had 
amused a former generation, and who still survived 
to recall and propagate anecdotes not always fit for 
ears polite. Amongst her eccentricities she once 
won the Newdigate : the judges, agreed upon the 
poem which deserved the prize, broke the motto'd 
envelope to find within the card of Miss Rachel 
Burton. Her sister "Tom," married to Marshall 
Hacker, vicar of Iffley, I knew well ; and I remem- 
ber too the illustrious Jack, lodging in the corner 
house of what was then called Coach and Horse 
Lane, sunning herself on summer days without her 
wig and in wild dishabille on a small balcony over- 
looking the garden of a house in which I often 
visited. A wild story, which being absolutely un- 
true, does infinite credit to the inventive powers of 
the generation that originated it, explained in my 
time Mr. Marshall Hacker's double appellation. 
His name was said to have been Marshall ; and he 
was by profession a surgeon. His intimate friend 
was injured while shooting, and Marshall ampu- 
tated the wounded limb. The patient died, in 
consequence, he believed, of unskilful treatment 
under the knife. He bequeathed a fortune to the 
operator, on condition that he should at once take 
orders, becoming thereby precluded from pro- 
fessional practice, and that he should assume the 
surname of Hacker. It seemed to be one of those 
stories which, as Charles Kingsley used to say, are 
too good not to be true ; but I am bound to 
destroy it : for I have learned that Mr. Marshall 



OXFORD IN THE THIRTIES 9 

was never a surgeon, and that he took the name of 
Hacker on inheriting property descending to him 
from an ancestress, sister to Colonel Hacker the 
regicide, who married a Marshall in 1645. 

Another of these vestals was Miss, or, as she 
liked to be called, Mrs. Horseman, dressy and 
made up, and posthumously juvenile, but retaining 
something of the beauty which had won the heart 
of Lord Holland's eldest son years before, when 
at Oxford with his tutor Shuttleworth, until her 
Ladyship took the alarm, swept down, and carried 
him off; and had attracted admiring notice from 
the Prince Regent in the Theatre, as she sat in 
the Ladies' Gallery with her lovely sister, Mrs. 
Nicholas. They came from Bath ; I have always 
imagined their mother to be the " Mrs. Horseman, 
a very old, very little, very civil, very ancient- 
familied, good, quaint old lady," with whom Fanny 
Burney spent an evening in I79I. 1 Miss Horse- 
man herself was a witty, well-bred, accomplished 
woman. Her memory was an inexhaustible trea- 
sure-house of all the apt sayings, comic incidents, 
memorable personages of the past thirty years, 
dispensed with gossip and green tea to her guests 
round the little drawing-room of her house in 
Skimmery Hall Lane, hung with valuable Claude 
engravings in their old black frames. She outlived 
her bright faculties, became childish, and wandered 
in her talk, but to the last shone forth in all the 
glaring impotence of dress, ever greeting me with 
cordial welcome, and pathetically iterative anecdote. 

1 Madame D'Arblay's " Diary," vol. v. p. 257. 



10 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

She lies just outside St. Mary's Church ; I see her 
grave through the railings as I pass along the 
street. That is the final record of all those charm- 
ing antediluvians ; " arl gone to churchyard," says 
Betty Maxworthy in " Lorna Doone." La farce est 
jouee^ tire le rideau ; but it is something to recall 
and fix the Manes Acheronte remissos. 



CHAPTER II 

ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 

"/ am known to be a humorous patrician ; hasty and 
tinder -like upon too trivial motion ; what I think I utter, and 
spend my malice in my breath" SHAKESPEARE. 

Thomas Dunbar Brasenose Ale A famous Chess Club Dunbar's 
Impromptus "Horse" Kett of Trinity Oriel Oddities Cople- 
ston Blanco White Whately Dr. Bull of Christchurch The 
Various Species of Dons The Senior Fellow Some Venerable 
Waifs Tom Davis Dr. Ellerton of Magdalen Rudd of Oriel 
Edward Quicke of New College Dr. Frowd of Corpus His 
Vagaries as Preacher and Politician A Brother Bedlamite 
" Mo " Griffith of Merton His Quips and Cranks. 

READERS who, like supercilious Mr. Peter MagnusTi 
are not fond of anything original, had better skip 
this chapter ; if, with young Marlow in " She 
Stoops to Conquer," they can say more good- 
naturedly, " He's a character, and I'll humour 
him," let them persevere ; for I shall recall not 
a few among the Oxford Characters of my early 
recollections. They were common enough in 
those days. Nature, after constructing an oddity, 
was wont to break the mould ; and her more 
roguish experiments stood exceptional, numerous, 
distinct, and sharply denned. Nowadays, at 
Oxford, as elsewhere, men seem to me to be 
turned out by machinery ; they think the same 
thoughts, wear the same dress, talk the same 
shop, in Parliament, or Bar, or Mess, or Com- * 



12 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

mon Room. Even in the Forties Characters were 
becoming rare ; as the Senior Fellows of Corpus 
and of Merton, Frowd and Mo. Griffith two 
oddities of whom I shall have something to say 
later on were one day walking together round 
Christchurch Meadow, little Frowd was over- 
heard lamenting that the strange Originals of 
their younger days seemed to have vanished from 
the skirts of Oxford knowledge ; but was con- 
soled by Griffith " Does it not occur to you, 
Dr. Frowd, that you and I are the 'Characters' 
of to-day?" 

First in my list shall come Thomas Dunbar, of 
Brasenose, keeper of the Ashmolean, poet, anti- 
quary, conversationalist. Didbin, in his " Biblio- 
graphical Decameron," congratulates Oxford on 
Dunbar's appointment to the neglected museum, 
which he cleansed, smartened, rearranged, res- 
cuing from dust and moths the splendid twelfth- 
century " Bestiarium " which Ashmole had placed 
in the collection. His poems, vers de l } University 
were handed about in manuscript, and are mostly 
lost. I possess an amusing squib on " Brasenose 
Ale," commemorating the else forgotten Brasenose 
dons and city wine merchants of the day ; J with 
an ode composed by him as Poet Laureate to a 
famous chess club, whose minutes have passed 
from my bookshelves to swell the unrivalled col- 
lection of Mr. Madan, the accomplished Sub- 
Librarian at the Bodleian. 2 It was recited at an 
anniversary dinner, where sat as invited guests 

1 Appendix A. 2 Appendix B. 



ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 13 

Mr. Markland, of Bath ; Sir Christopher Pegge ; 
porter-loving Dale of B.N.C. satirised in " Brase- 
nose Ale " ; with Henry Matthews, author of the 
"Diary of an Invalid." 1 " It was a sumptuous 
dinner," the minutes fondly record ; it began at 
five o'clock, and must have continued till after 
nine; for "Old Tom is tolling" is written on the 
opposite page. The King's Arms, where it was 
held, still stands ; but the delightful symposiasts, 
with their powdered hair and shirt-frills, their 
hessians or silk stockings, their sirloins and 
eighteenth-century port, are gone to what Dunbar's 
poem calls the Mansion of Hades. His, too, was 
the lampoon on the two corpulent brothers, whose 
names I will not draw from their dread abode. 
Respectively a physician and a divine, they were 
lazy and incapable in either function. This is 
Dunbar's friendly estimate of the pair : 

Here D.D. toddles, M.D. rolls, 
Were ever such a brace of noddies ? 

D.U. has the cure of souls, 
M.D. has the care of bodies. 

Between them both what treatment rare 

Our bodies and our souls endure ; 
One has the cure without the care, 

And one the care without the cure. 2 

1 Appendix C. 

2 One of my critics claims these lines for Horace Smith, of 
the "Rejected Addresses." They were ascribed to Dunbar 
in my time ; are perhaps more likely to be by a man not 
known beyond Oxford, than to one amongst those of wider 
fame on whom at that time every unauthentic jeu tfesprit 
was fathered. 



14 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

But his most brilliant reputation was colloquial ; 
sparkling with apt quotations and with pointed 
well-placed anecdotes, he was especially happy in 
his impromptus. Leaving England for the East, 
the Club accredit him with a Latin letter, penned 
by Gilbert, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, to 
the Prince of the Faithful, as Grand Master of 
Oriental chess-craft. He returns thanks in "a 
warm and impressive Latin oration " ; and sud- 
denly perceiving that the seal appended to the 
commendatory epistle is enclosed in an oyster 
shell, he exclaims, "Et in Graecia Ostracismum 
Aristidi ostendam ! " One of the Heads of Houses 
had four daughters Mary, a don ; Lucy, a blue- 
stocking ; Susan, a simpleton ; Fanny, a sweet 
unaffected girl. Asked by Lucy the meaning of 
the word alliteration, with scarcely a pause he 
replied : 

Minerva-like majestic Mary moves ; 
Law, Latin, logic, learned Lucy loves ; 
Serenely silent, Susan's smiles surprise ; 
From fops, from flatterers, fairest Fanny flies. 

The "toast" of the day was a beautiful Miss 
Charlotte Ness. She asked Dunbar the force of 
the words abstract and concrete, which she had 
heard in a University sermon. A few moments' 
silence produced the following : 

Say, what is Abstract ? what Concrete ? 

Their difference define. 
They both in one fair form unite, 

And that fair form is thine. 





^^^^BBBBBHBBH 






AVJ 



"HORSE" KETT 

From a Portrait by Dighton 



ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 15 

How so ? this riddle pray undo. 

'Tis no hard-laboured guess, 
For when I lovely Charlotte view, 

I then view lovely Ness. 

He was a man of good family, hovering between 
London, Bath, and Oxford. A room in our house 
at Oxford was within my memory known as Mr. 
Dunbar's room. His walking-stick was handed 
down to me, a serpent-twined caduceus, with the 
names of the Nine Muses on the gold handle. Styx 
novies interfusa he called it. 

Contemporary with Dunbar was " Horse " Kett, 
of Trinity. In his portrait by Dighton, here repro- 
duced, the long face, dominated by the straight 
bony nose, explains and justifies the epithet. He was 
a man of considerable ability ; Bampton lecturer, 
novelist ; and just missed the Poetry Professorship. 
His Bampton Lectures of 1790, on the " Conduct 
and opinions of the Primitive Christians," show a 
historic insight surprising for that period. His 
critical powers were acknowledged by De Quincy, 
who referred to him the once burning, now for- 
gotten, question of the plagiarism in White's Bamp- 
ton Lectures. White had been assisted in their 
composition by Parr, by Parsons, Master of Balliol, 
by a Dr. Gabriel of Bath, and by a dissenting 
minister, Mr. Badcock. Kett, called in to arbitrate 
and reconcile, reprimanded the accomplices all 
round. But his repute was due to his strange equine 
face, inspiring from the seniors jokes in every learned 
language, and practical impertinences from the less 
erudite youngsters. When his back was turned in 
lecture, the men filled his snuff-box with oats. Dr. 



1 6 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Kidd used to relate how, attending him in his rooms 
for some ailment, he heard a strange rattle in the 
letter-box of the outer door : " Only a note (an 
oat)," said the good-natured victim. Walter Savage 
Landor tried on him his prentice hand 

" The Centaur is not fabulous," says Young. 1 

Had Young known Kett, 
He'd say, " Behold one, put together wrong ; 

The head is horseish, but, what yet 
Was never seen in man or beast, 
The rest is human or, at least, 
Is Kett." 

He published a book which he called tl Logic 
Made Easy," puffing himself on the title page as a 
public University Examiner. It was a dialogue 
between a father and his motherless daughter 
Emily ; was a feeble production and filled with 
blunders. A pamphlet from Copleston's pen, en- 
titled "The Examiner Examined," scourged it with 
merciless severity ; and bore as its motto 

Aliquis latet error ; Equo ne credite, Teucri ; 

a stroke of personal impertinence better perhaps 
omitted. Dunbar, too, had ready his possibly pre- 
meditated impromptu. Some one asked him who 
were the Proctors in a certain year : they were 
Darnel, of Corpus, and Kett. Dunbar answered 

Infelix Lolium et steriles dominantur Avence. 

1 A book notable in its day." Young (E.) ' The Centaur not 
Fabulous, in Six Letters to a Friend on " The Life in Vogue," ' 
8vo, copperplate front., symbolic of the public's careless gaiety, 
calf, 35. 6d., 1755." The parody on Byron in the "Rejected 
Addresses " contains the line " Centaurs (not fabulous) these 
rules efface." 



ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 17 

The mention of Copleston carries one to Oriel/] 
peopled at that time with "characters" of a very 
exalted type. Copleston, substantial, majestic, 
"richly coloured," as T. Mozley calls him, was 
Provost ; a man not without asperities of mind and 
manner we recall his rudeness to J. H. Newman, 
dining in Hall as a newly-elected Fellow : but, as 
a man of the world, in London society, regular con- 
tributor to the Quarterly Review, author of widely- 
read and accepted pamphlets on currency and 
finance, he held absolute ascendancy amongst the 
higher class of University men, and filled his College 
with Fellows strangely alien to the port and pre- 
judice, the clubbable whist-playing somnolence, 
which Gibbon first, then Sydney Smith, found 
characteristic of Oxford society. I saw him only 
once, as Bishop of Llandaff ; but his mien and 
presence were carefully preserved and copied by 
old Joseph Parker, the bookseller, who resembled 
him curiously in face and voice, and, in a suit of 
formal black, with frill at the breast and massive 
gold seals pendent from the fob, imitated his walk 
and manner. He carried on at Oriel the innova- 
tion of his predecessor, Provost Eveleigh, who had 
forced on a reluctant University the Public Exa- 
mination for a B.A. degree; 1 and who gave his 
Fellowships not so much to technical attainment 
as to evidence of intellectual capacity ; to Copleston 
himself, to Whately, Keble, Davison, Hawkins, I 

Vl The first Public Examination was held in 1802. Two men 
were placed in the First Class : Abel Hendy, who died in 1808 ; 
John Mariiott, the friend of Walter Scott, who dedicated to him 
the Second Canto of " Marmion.'' 

B 



1 8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

j Hampden, Arnold; men who formed in Oxford 
what was known as the Noetic School, maintaining 
around them a continuing dialectical and mental fer- 
ment. Tommy Short used to say that Davison and 
Whately habitually crammed for after-dinner talk ; 
and unfortunate outlanders, whose digestion of the 
dinner and enjoyment of the port wine was spoiled 
by it, complained that Oriel Common Room stunk 
of logic. A country clergyman once, after listening 
to Whately' s talk throughout the evening, thanked 
him formally for the pains he had taken to instruct 
him. "Oh, no," said Whately, "not instruct; I did 
not mean to be didactic ; but one sometimes likes 
having an anvil on which to beat out one's thoughts." 
Amongst them too was Blanco White Hyperion 
they called him, as Copleston was Saturn adopted 
not only into Oriel, but into English society and 
the English Church. He is believed to have not 
written, but inspired Hampden's famous Bampton 
Lectures : an old survivor of those days, Canon 
Hinds Howell, White's pupil at the time, told me 
how day after day for months before they were 
delivered Hampden was closeted with Blanco. 
Whately was a prominent Oxford figure, with bla- 
tant voice, great stride, rough dress. I remember 
my mother's terror when he came to call. She had 
met him in the house of newly-married Mrs. Baden- 
Powell, who had filled her drawing-room with the 
spider-legged chairs just then coming into fashion. 
On one of these sat Whately, swinging, plunging, 
and shifting on his seat while he talked. An omin- 
ous crack was heard ; a leg of the chair had given 

way; he tossed it on to the sofa without comment, 



ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 19 

and impounded another chair. The history of the ' 
Noetic school has not been written ; its interest was 
obscured by the reactionary movement on which so, 
many pens have worked. 

I cross, for the present only, from Oriel to 
Christchurch, and encounter sailing out of Peck- 
water a very notable Canon of "the House/' Dr. 
Bull. Tall, portly, handsome, beautifully dressed 
and groomed he was known as Jemmy Jessamy 
in his youth I hail him as type of the ornamental 
Don. For of Dons there were four kinds. There 
was the cosmopolitan Don ; with a home in Oxford, 
but conversant with select humanity elsewhere ; 
like Addison and Prior in their younger days, Tom 
Warton in the Johnsonian era, Philip Duncan in 
my recollection ; at home in coffee house, club, 
theatre ; sometimes in Parliament, like Charles 
Neate ; sometimes at Court, like William Bathurst 
of All Souls, Clerk to the Privy Council. There 
was the learned Don, amassing a library, editing 
Latin authors and Greek plays, till his useful career 
was extinguished under an ill-placed, ill-fitting 
mitre. There was the meer Don, as Sir Thomas 
Overbury calls him ; Head of a House commonly 
as the resultant of a squabble amongst the electing 
Fellows, with a late-married wife as uncouth and 
uneducated as himself, forming with a few affluent 
saddles an exclusive, pompous, ignorant, lazy set, 
"respecting no man in the University, and re- 
spected by no man out of it." Lastly, the orna- 
mentalDon ; representative proxenus to distinguished 
strangers, chosen as Proctor or Vice-Chancellor 
against a probable Installation or Royal visit. 



20 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Bull played this part to perfection, as did Dr. 
Wellesley in the next generation. He had gained 
his double first and kindred decorations as a 
young man, but promotion early and plural lighted 
on his head, promotion, not to posts which tax 
and generate effort, but to cushioned ease of 
canonries ; and he dropped into the manager of 
Chapter legislations and surveyor of College pro- 
perties ; a butterfly of the most gorgeous kind, 
a Morpho, such as dear old Westwood used to 
unveil before visitors to his museum, yet still only 
a butterfly. He was a man of pluck and deter- 
mination ; his overthrow of redoubtable Bishop 
Philpotts was immortalised by a delightful cartoon 
in an early Punch a bishop tossed by a bull ; 
he had the manner of a royal personage ; you 
must follow his lead and accept his dicta; but 
he was a generous, kindly Dives, of a day when 
Lazarus had not come to the front with unem- 
ployed and democratic impeachments, to drop 
flies into the fragrant ointment, to insinuate 
scruples as to the purple and fine linen, to predict 
the evolutionary downfall of those who toil not 
neither spin. He would be impossible at the 
present day, and perhaps it is just as well. He 
was Canon of Christchurch, Canon of Exeter, 
Prebendary of York, and held the good College 
living of Staverton, all at once : 

" On the box with Will Whip, ere the days of the Rail, 
To London I travelled ; and inside the mail 
Was a Canon of Exeter ; on the same perch 
Was a Canon of Oxford's Episcopal Church. 
Next came one who held I will own the thing small 
In the Minster of York a prebendary stall. 



ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 21 

And there sate a Parson, all pursy and fair, 

With a Vicarage fat and five hundred a year. 

Now, good reader, perhaps you will deem the coach full ? 

No there was but one traveller DOCTOR JOHN BULL ! " 

An oddiiypar excellence was the " Senior Fellow " : 
an oddity then, a palaeozoic memory now. He 
vanished with the Forties ; Railways, New Museums, 
University Commissions, were too much for him. 
He was no mere senior, primus inter pares only 
in respect of age ; he was exceptional, solitary, 
immemorial ; in the College but not of it ; left 
stranded by a generation which had passed ; a great 
gulf in habits, years, associations, lay between the 
existing Common Room and himself. He mostly 
lived alone ; the other men treated him deferen- 
tially and called him Mister ; he met them in Hall 
on Gaudy days and was sometimes seen in Chapel ; 
but no one ever dropped in upon him, smoked 
with him, walked with him ; he was thought to 
have a history ; a suspicion of disappointment 
hung over him ; he lived his own eccentric, friend- 
less life, a victim to superannuation and celibacy. 

Not a few of these venerable waifs come back to 
me from early years. There was old Tom Davies, 
Senior Fellow of Jesus, visible every day from 
3 to 4 P.M., when he walked alone in all weathers 
twice round Christchurch meadow. He was the 
finest judge of wine in Oxford "the nose of 
kaut-go4t and the tip of taste" could, it was 
believed, tell a vintage accurately by the smell. 
Joyous was the Common Room steward who 
could call in his judgment to aid in the purchase 
of pipe or butt. He refused all the most valuable 



22 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

College livings in turn, because the underground 
cellars of their parsonages were inadequate ; lived 
and died in his rooms, consuming meditatively, 
like Mr. Tulkinghorn, a daily cob-webbed bottle 
of his own priceless port. 

There was old Dr. Ellerton, Senior Fellow of 
Magdalen, who used to totter out of Chapel with 
the President on a Sunday. I have seen a laugh- 
able sketch of the pair, as Shuttleworth, Warden of 
New College, a dexterous caricaturist, spied them 
from his window shuffling along New College Lane 
to a^convocation. Coaevals they appeared, but Routh 
was really the senior by ten years. As time went 
on, Routh's intellect survived his friend's ; he came 
to shake his wig at the mention of Ellerton's name; 
and say, " he is grown old and foolish, sir." He was 
a mild Hebrew scholar, and is embalmed as co- 
founder with Dr. Pusey of the small annual prize 
known as the Pusey and Ellerton Scholarship. His 
rooms were at the corner of the quadrangle, looking 
on to the deer park and the great plane tree. He 
was a picturesquely ugly man ; the gargoyle above 
his window was a portrait, hardly an exaggeration, 
of his grotesque old face. Years before, when the 
building was restored and he was College tutor, the 
undergraduates had bribed the sculptor to fashion 
there in stone the visage of their old Damcetas ; he 
detected the resemblance, and insisted angrily on 
alteration. Altered the face was : cheeks and 
temples hollowed, jaw-lines deepened, similitude 
for the time effaced. But gradually the unkind 
invisible chisel of old age worked upon his own 
octogenarian countenance ; his own cheek was 



ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 23 

hollowed, his own jaw contracted, till the quaint 
projecting mask became again a likeness even more 
graphic than before. 

I remember old Mr. Rudd, Senior Fellow of Oriel 
since 1819, who appeared always at the Gaudy in 
black shorts and silk stockings, travelling up from 
Northampton in a fly, and spending two days on 
the journey. Then I knew Edward Quicke, of New 
College, whose one lingering senile passion was for 
tandem-driving ; the famous " Arter-Xerxes " story 
had its source in his groom and him. Twice a day 
he might be seen, sitting melancholy behind his 
handsome pair along the roads round Oxford. He 
died, I may say, in harness ; for one dark night in 
the vacation he was run down near Woodstock 
by two scouts, and succumbed in a few days to his 
injuries. With him was old Eastwick, who after 
spending some years, poor fellow, in a lunatic 
asylum, reappeared to end his days in College. 
He had once, we supposed, been young ; had lived 
and loved and gathered rosebuds ; had certainly 
begun life as a briefless barrister. At a Gaudy 
dinner once sardonic Shuttleworth congratulated 
him " on an accession to his income." " I beg your 

pardon, Mr. Warden, I was not aware " "Oh ! 

I beg yours, but I was told that you had left o 
going circuit." He came back from durance vile a 
quiet, watery-eyed, lean old man, looking like a 
scarecrow in good circumstances, dining in Hall, 
where he was mostly silent, yet broke out curiously 
sometimes with reminiscences, forbodings, protests ; 
spent the livelong day in eradicating dandelions 
from the large grass-plat in the front quadrangle, 



24 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

his coat-tails falling over his shoulders as he stooped, 
and leaving him, like the poor Indian of the parody, 
" bare behind." Once more there was old Maude, 
of Queen's, one of the detenus as they were called 
the ten thousand English tourists seized brutally by 
Napoleon when war was suddenly declared in 1803, 
and kept in prison till his abdication. Maude came 
back to Oxford, eleven years of his life wiped out 
and his contemporaries passed away, to live alone 
in his old-fashioned, scantily furnished rooms, where 
I remember his giving me breakfast in my school- 
days and quoting to me Dr. Johnson's "Vanity 
of Human Wishes." 

These were curios of no great native force 
spectacular oddities merely ; two more remain, 
whose amusing outbreaks of indecorum and forcible 
gifts of speech deserve a longer notice : Dr. Frowd, 
of Corpus, and " Mo." Griffith, of Merton. Frowd 
was a very little man, an irrepressible, unwearied 
chatterbox, with a droll interrogative face, a bald 
shining head, and a fleshy under-lip, which he could 
push up nearly to his nose. He had been chaplain 
to Lord Exmouth, and was present at the bom- 
bardment of Algiers. As the action thickened he 
was seized with a comical religious frenzy, dashing 
round the decks, and diffusing spiritual exhortation 
amongst the half-stripped, busy sailors, till the first 
lieutenant ordered a hencoop to be clapped over 
him, whence his little head emerging continued its 
devout cackle, quite regardless of the balls which 
flew past him and killed eight hundred sailors in 
our small victorious fleet. Lord Exmouth rescued 
him from this incarceration, and to keep him out of 




ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 25 

mischief set him to unload and pack a large crate of 
port wine, presenting him with three dozen for him- 
self. This gift was his pride through life ; very rarely 
drunk, but boasted of to every guest in Common 
Room. At his death his will bequeathed to the 
Rev. George Hext, a brother Fellow, " all my wine 
in Corpus College cellars." It amounted only to 
seven surviving bottles of the famous port ; the 
deprome quadrimum must have been repeated more 
frequently than was supposed. He was a preacher 
of much force and humour, if only one had the self- 
possession risum tenere. I heard him once in St. 
Clement's Church deliver a sermon on Jonah, which 
roused up his congregation quite as effectually as the 
shipmaster wakened the sleepy prophet. " There's 
a man in this church who never says his prayers : 
lies down at night, rises in the morning, without a 
word of gratitude or adoration for the God who 
made him and has preserved him. Now, I have a 
message to that man what meanest thou, O thou 
sleeper ? arise," &c., &c. " Hell," he began another 
time, with a knowing wag of his droll head, " Hell 
is a place which men believe to be reserved for 
those who are a great deal worse than themselves." 
Presently he became husky, drew out a lozenge 
and sat down in the pulpit to masticate it leisurely, 
while we looked at one another, wished that we had 
lozenges, and awaited the consumption of his lubri- 
cant. In reading chapters from the Old Testament, 
he used to pause at a marginal variation, read it to 
himself half audibly, and, like Dr. Blimber, smile on 
it auspiciously or knit his brow and shake his head 
in disapproval. I remember too his preaching in All 



26 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Saints Church, of which Thompson, afterwards 
rector of Lincoln, was incumbent. He climbed up 
the steep three-decker steps into the high-walled 
pulpit, and disappeared, till, his hands clinging 
to the desk and his comical face peering over 
it, he called down into the reading desk below, 
" Thompson, send up a hassock." A College living 
was offered to him : and a funeral being due, he 
went down to bury the dead and survey the place. 
Arrived at the nearest railway station, he found no 
conveyance except a carriage which had just de- 
posited a wedding party. Into this he jumped 
coachman, whip, horses, being all decked with 
favours met the mournful procession, and finding 
the churchyard path muddy, climbed on the white- 
ribboned driver's back, and was borne to the church 
in front of the coffin amid the cheers and laughter 
of the amateur onlookers, who in the country as- 
semble always at these instructive functions. He 
accepted the living after this escapade, but the 
College refused to present him, and were sustained 
on his appeal to the Visitor. To another prank 
they were unjustifiably lenient. A contested election 
of a member for the University was proceeding, the 
excitement high and the voting close. Frowd 
paired with four men against one of the candidates, 
then went up and voted. A London club would 
have expelled a man for such a feat ; but Frowd 
seems to have been looked upon as a chartered 
libertine, and the offence was passed over on receipt 
of an unintelligibly remorseful letter "You have 
from me a poenitet in duodecimo and a habes con- 
fitentem reum in quarto " with a request, however, 












ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 27 

that he would absent himself from the College for a 
twelvemonth. His rooms were on the second floor 
looking out into the meadow ; in the room below 
him lived Holme, a more advanced Bedlamite even 
than himself, a pleasant fellow as I remember him 
in his interlunar periods, but who died, I believe, in 
an asylum. Frowd used to take exercise on wet 
days by placing chairs at intervals round his room 
and jumping over them. Holme, a practical being, 
one day fired a pistol at his ceiling while these 
gymnastics were proceeding, and the bullet whizzed 
past Frowd, who, less unconcerned than at Algiers, 
ran downstairs, put his head into the room, and 
cried, " Would you, bloody-minded man, would 
you ? " The feeling in the Common Room was 
said to be regret that the bullet had not been 
billeted ; Frowd would have ceased to exasperate, 
Holme would have been incarcerated or hanged, 
the College rid of both. 

Moses Griffith was son to a physician of the same 
name. In the hospital where the father practised 
a particular kind of poultice was long known as 
a "mogriff." The son, objecting to the nickname 
" Mo," obtained the royal licence to bear the name 
of Edwards, gradually dropping the Moses and the 
final letter s, and appearing in the later University 
Calendar as Edward Griffith ; but though gods 
might call him Edward, mortals called him " Mo." 
Twice in the year he was compelled to sign his true 
name on receiving a dividend ; and it was not well 
to go near him at those times. He was much more 
than an oddity a real wit, racy in ironical talk, 
prompt in bitter or diverting repartee. In younger 



28 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

days he was Whitehall Preacher, an appointment 
then made for life ; but became so tedious as time 
passed that the Bishop of London, Howley, called 
on him to suggest his retirement. He was over- 
powered by Mo's formal politeness, and came away 
discomfited ; and Griffith remained until Blom- 
field, succeeding to the bishopric, dismissed all the 
preachers, and replaced the best of them under 
fresh rules, mainly in order to get rid of Mo. 1 If 
you wished to rouse his anger, you had only to men- 
tion Bishop Blomfield, who had thus righteously 
deposed him from his Whitehall preachership. 
" Sir, he was born a blackguard ; he's a Bury St. 
Edmund's blackguard, and he'll die a blackguard." 
Blomfield's father kept a school at Bury, and the 
future Bishop was there born, and was educated at 
the Grammar School. Mo. disliked the free use of 
oaths in conversation : one of the Senior Fellows, 

W , retained this fault of his blood, as Queen 

Elizabeth called it, rather too faithfully ; his every 
sixth or seventh word began with the letter D. 
Bishop Hobhouse, lately dead laus illi debetur et a 
me gratia maior remembered Griffith one day fol- 
lowing W out of the Common Room, and call- 
ing through his door : " Mr. W , Mr. W , 

Walter Kerr says he won't dine in Hall if you 
continue to swear." Walter Kerr Hamilton was 
Denison's Curate at St. Peter's, and afterwards 
Bishop of Salisbury. But Mo. was not quite free 
from the habit himself ; I was told by Archdeacon 
Bree that, returning one day from a powerful 

1 A history of the Whitehall preacherships is given in the 
Appendix S. 













ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 29 

sermon at St. Mary's against profane swearing, he 

was overheard saying to himself, " I'm d d if I 

ever swear again." W was a curious survival ; 

a little, made-up old man, with the habits and the 
talk of long-ago West End clubs, attired always 
for evening dress in a satin scarf and a finely 
embroidered waistcoat. Going once to preach at 
Wolvercot, Mo. took with him William Karslake, a 
young Fellow of the College, who had found favour 
in his eyes. " How did you like my sermon, sir ? " 
was the first question, as they walked through the 
fields homewards. "A very fine sermon, Mr. 
Griffith ; perhaps a little above the audience." 
"Audience, my friend. I suppose these dear 
young turnip-tops would understand my sermon 
as readily as those rustics. Sir, that was a White- 
hall sermon." He sometimes read the service at 
Holywell, a Merton living. The lesson happened 
to be the third chapter of St. Luke. Griffith read 
on till he came to the formidable pedigree at the 
end. " Which was the son of Heli," he began ; 
then, glancing at the genealogical Banquo-line 
which follows " the rest concerns neither you 
nor me, so here endeth the Second Lesson." He 
used to attend the St. Mary's afternoon service. 
A prolonged University sermon had retarded the 
parish service, and it was near five o'clock when 
Copeland, who sometimes preached for Newman, 
approached the pulpit. He was stopped in the 
aisle by Griffith, who said in one of his stentorian 
asides, " I am grieved to quit you, Mr. Copeland, 
but Merton College dines at five." 

He spent the Oxford term-times usually at Bath 



30 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

" City of Balls and Beggars " he was wont to 
superscribe his letters thence hating the sight of 
the Philistines, as he called the undergraduates. 
" Fetch a screen, Manciple," he said one day, when 
dining alone in Hall he beheld a belated solitary 
scholar who had not gone down ; but he resided in 
the vacations, and always attended College meet- 
ings. The late Warden, I have heard, used to relate 
that when he was candidate for a Fellowship and 
Griffith came up to vote, his colleagues tried to 
impress upon him the duty of awarding the Fellow- 
ship according to the examiners' verdict. " Sir," 
said Mo., " I came here to vote for my old friend's 
son, and vote for him I shall, whatever the exa- 
miners may say." He would sometimes bring a 
guest to the College dinner, watching anxiously 
over his prowess with the knife and fork. Ab- 
stemiousness he could not abide : Dr. Wootten, an 
Oxford physician, dined with him one day, and did 
scant justice to the dishes: " My maxim, Mr. Griffith, 
is to eat and leave off hungry." Mo. threw up his 
hands as he was wont : " Eat and leave off hungry ! 
Why not wash and leave off dirty ? " So often as a 
haunch of venison was announced for the high 
table, he would invite my father, a renowned diner- 
out in former days, but made domestic by tarda 
podagra. I remember his exit once, fuming at my 
father's refusal. " My friend," laying hand upon 
his sleeve, " you will eat mutton till the wool grows 
out of your coat." Once, at a large party in our 
house, good-natured, loquacious Mrs. Routh, the 
President of Magdalen's wife, addressed him. 
" Mr. Griffith, do you ever take carriage exercise ; 







ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 31 

rive in a fly, I mean ? " " Madam, I thank God 
I am not quite such a blackguard." He used to 
ask me to his rooms when I was a boy, and regale 
me with strawberries. He would make me recite 
poetry to him the " Elegy," " Sweet Auburn," 
" The Traveller," which I knew by heart rewarding 
me with presents of books ; on one occasion with a 
fine set of Pope's " Homer " in eleven volumes, 
bearing the bookplate of Edward Griffith. Much 
later, and shortly before his death, I met him at a 
Merton dinner. Edmund Hobhouse had brought 
Sir Benjamin Brodie. "Who is that gentleman ?" 
asked Griffith in his sonorous whisper. He was 
told. A pause, during which Mo. glared at the 
great surgeon; then the word " Butcher!" was 
heard to hiss along the table. He comes before me 

Bin an unbrushed beaver hat, a black coat and waist- 
coat, nankeen trousers, and low shoes, with a vast 
interval of white stocking. Requiescat in Pace! 



CHAPTER III 

PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 

" We will be wise in time: what though our ivork 
Be fashioned in despite of their ill- service. 
Be crippled every way ? ' Twere little praise 
Did full resources wait on our good will 
At every turn. Let all be as it is." 

BROWNING. 

Dr. Daubeny His Physic Garden His Monkeys and their Eman- 
cipation A Pioneer of Science Buckland and his Friends 
His Wife His Lectures A Scotch Sceptic and how he was 
Silenced The Buckland Menage The Buckland Collection in 
the Oxford Museum Baden-Powell Thomas, the Holywell 
Glazier Chapman, the Discoverer of Cetiosaurus. 

PRESCIENTIFIC unquestionably : in the Thirties 
the Oxford mind was inscient ; its attitude first 
contemptuous, then hostile, towards the science 
that, invita Minerva, was hatching in its midst ; a 
strange, new, many-headed, assertive thing, claim- 
ing absurdly to take rank with the monopolist 
Humanities of Donland, not altogether without 
concealed intent to challenge and molest the 
ancient, solitary reign of its theology. Yet science 
none the less there was, sustained by at least 
three famous names, making possible the Phillips, 
Brodie, Rolleston of a later date. Its first repre- 
sentative of note was Daubeny ; Doctor, not Pro- 
fessor, Daubeny ; Professor as a titular prefix 
< came in much later ; came, I am told, through 




DR. DAUBENY 

From a Photograph taken in 1860 




PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 33 

ie Scottish Universities, which had borrowed it 
from Germany. First Class and Fellow of Mag- 
dalen, he early forsook practice as a physician 
to devote himself to pure science ; as a pupil of 
Jameson, Professor of Geology at Edinburgh, he 
studied, fifty years before his time, what is now 
known and valued as " Petrology " ; became widely 
known by his works on the " Atomic Theory" and 
on " Volcanic Action " ; and when Dr. Williams 
died in 1834, succeeded him as professor of 
chemistry, botany, rural economy, taking up his 
abode in the house built newly at the entrance 
to Magdalen bridge. He lectured, experimented, 
wrote ; his books on Roman husbandry, and on 
the trees and shrubs of the ancients, are still in- 
valuable to the Virgilian scholar ; he carried out 
elaborately and with improved devices Pouchet's 
experiments on spontaneous generation, was the 
first to welcome and extend in England Schon- 
bein's discovery of ozone. His chemistry lectures 
were a failure ; he lacked physical force, sprightli- 
ness of manner, oral readiness, and his demonstra- 
tions invariably went wrong. But his lectures drew 
many noted University men ; Pusey, Whately, Tait, 
Thomson, Charles Neate, Mark Pattison, Liddell, 
Acland, Ruskin, Frank Buckland, are all inscribed 
in his Pupil-book, which the College still preserves. \ 
He lavished care and money on his " Physic 
Garden," introducing De Candolle's system side 
by side with the old Linnaean beds, building new 
and spacious houses, in which flourished the 
Victoria lily, to be seen elsewhere for a long time 
only at Kew and Chatsworth, and where the aloe 

C 



34 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

produced its one bloom of the century, its great 
raceme rising in seven days to the height of four- 
and-twenty feet. He cared little for outdoor 
plants, and could not condescend to rudimentary 
teaching ; educational botany, prospering at Cam- 
bridge under Henslow, took no hold of Oxford. 
But it was pleasant to walk with him round the 
garden, and to hear his disquisitions on the Scam- 
mony and Christ's Thorn, the Weeping Willow 
from Pope's Twickenham Garden, the Paestum Rose, 
the Birthwort from Godstow ruins, the Mandrake 
under the Conservatory wall, the Sibthorpia and 
Orontium in the little copper cisterns long swept 
away : and happily, the garden was for nearly 
eighty years in the care of the two Baxters, father 
and son, both of them amongst the best exponents 
in England of our native Flora. Their assiduity 
and knowledge resulted in a collection of hardy 
growths, exceptional in healthiness and size, 
arranged with little rigidity of system, but, with 
deference to each plant's idiosyncrasies, in spots 
which the experimental tenderness of near a cen- 
tury showed to be appropriate. They laboured 
for a posterity which hastened to undo their work. 
New brooms swept the unique old garden clean ; 
young men arose who knew not Joseph ; young 
men in a hurry to produce a little Kew upon the 
incongruous Cherwell banks, 

Parvam Trojam, simulataque magnis 
Pergama, et arentem Xanthi cognomine rivum. 

So the time-honoured array was broken up, Baxter 
fits cashiered, the Linnaean borders razed, the 






PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 35 

monumental plants uprooted. Thus I wrote in 
1900 ; but better times have followed. The 
disaster has been repaired by the assiduity, zeal, 
knowledge, of the present professor, and his 
accomplished assistant Mr. W. G. Baker ; and 
the garden is again amongst the most delightful 
spots in Oxford. 

One of Daubeny's fads was a collection of 
monkeys, which he kept in a cage let into the 
Danby gateway. One night the doors were forced 
and the monkeys liberated, to be captured next 
day wandering dismal on the Iffley road, or 
perched crepitantes dentibus, on the railings in 
Rose Lane. The culprit was not known at the 
time ; it was mad Harry Wilkins, of Merton, who 
had sculled up the river after dark and so gained 
access to the locked-up gardens. Daubeny was 
pained by the foolish insult, and the menagerie 
was dispersed. He was genial and chatty in 
society ; in College Hall, or at evening parties, 
which he much frequented, we met the little, droll, 
spectacled, old-fashioned figure, in gilt-buttoned 
blue tail coat, velvet waistcoat, satin scarf, kid 
gloves too long in the fingers, a foot of bright 
bandanna handkerchief invariably hanging out be- 
hind. Or we encountered him on Sunday after- 
noons, in doctor's hood and surplice, tripping up 
the steps which led to the street, shuffling into 
Chapel, always late ; cross old Mundy, the College 
porter, dispossessing some unfortunate stranger to 
make way for him in the stalls. But with all his 
retirement he did his work as a witness to the 
necessity of science ; pleaded in pamphlets, letters, 



36 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

speeches, for its introduction into the University 
course, pressed on his own College successfully 
the establishment of science scholarships, helped 
on the time when, not in the Thirties, scarcely in 
the Forties, the hour and the man should come. 
He lived into old age, active to the last. Shortly 
before his death he visited me in Somersetshire, 
to meet his former schoolfellow, Lord Taunton. 
The two old men had not seen each other since 
they slept in the same room at Winchester fifty- 
five years before, along with one of the Barings, 
and Ford, author afterwards of the if Handbook 
to Spain." It was pleasant to hear the chirping 
reminiscences of the successful veterans, boys once 
again together. He died in 1867, and lies at rest 
beneath the stone pulpit in the Chapel court. 
A memorial tablet in the antechapel bears a 
Latin epitaph from the scholarly pen of his old 
friend John Rigaud. Ever I take off my hat 
when I pass his not forgotten grave, and pause, 
like Old Mortality, to clear encroaching moss from 
the letters which perpetuate his name. 
f~~ The second savant of the time was Buckland, 
and there was certainly no overlooking him. 
Elected Fellow of Corpus in 1809, he gave his 
whole time for ten years to the fossil-hunting 
begun by him in the Winchester chalkpits as a 
boy, not then reduced into a science; till in 1819 
the Prince Regent, at the instance of Sir Joseph 
Banks, created a professorship of geology, and 
nominated Buckland to the post. His lecture- 
room in the Ashmolean filled at once, not so much 
with undergraduates as with dons, attracted by 



PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 



37 



lis liveliness and the novelty of his subject. The 
Chancellor, Lord Grenville, visiting Oxford, sat 
beside and complimented him ; Howley, afterwards 
Archbishop, Sir Philip Egerton, so famous later as 
a collector, were among his devotees; Whately, 
Philip Duncan, Shuttleworth, pelted their friend 
with playful squibs : " Some doubts," wrote Shuttle- 
worth, 



" Some doubts were once expressed about the Flood, 
Buckland arose, and all was clear as mud." 



j 



Alarms about the Deluge had not yet been' 
generally awakened ; in his early works, Reliquia 
Diluviancz and Vindicice Geologicce, he posed as 
orthodox and reconcilist ; it was not till 1836 that 
his Bridgewater Treatise roused the heresy-hunters, 
that a hurricane of private and newspaper protests 
whistled round his disregarding head, that Dean 
Gaisford thanked God on his departure for Italy 
"We shall hear no more of his geology" that 
Pusey organised a protest against the conferring 
a degree on Owen, and Keble clenched a bitter 
argument by the conclusive dogma that "when 
God made the stones He made the fossils in them." 
Worse was still to come ; the " Six Days " were 
to be impeached ; the convenient formula " be- 
fore the Flood " to be dispossessed ; the old cos- 
mogony which puzzled Mr. Ephraim Jenkinson 
to fade slowly from the popular mind, reposing 
as a curiosity, where it still occasionally survives, 
amid the mental furniture of the country clergy : 
and in the great awakening of knowledge which 
severed theology from science and recast Biblical ] 



38 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

criticism he was amongst the earliest and most 
^energetic pioneers. The Clergy, the Dons, the 
Press, fell upon him all together ; " Keep the St. 
James' Chronicles," wrote to him his wife, " every- 
one of which has a rap at you ; but I beseech 
you not to lower your dignity by noticing news- 
paper statements." Wise words ! which not every 
wife would unreservedly emit. Without her moral 
aid and intellectual support Buckland would not 
so lightly and so confidently have faced his diffi- 
culties and achieved his aims. An accomplished 
mineralogist before their marriage, she threw her 
whole nature into her husband's work. She de- 
ciphered and transcribed his horribly illegible 
papers, often adding polish to their style ; and her 
skilful fingers illustrated many of his books. Night 
after night while his Bridgewater Treatise was 
in making, she sat up writing from his dictation 
till the morning sun shone through the shutters. 
From her came the first suggestion as to the true 
character of the lias coprolites. When, at two 
o'clock in the morning, the idea flashed upon him 
that the Cheirotherium footsteps were testudinal, 
he woke his wife from sleep ; she hastened down 
to make pie crust upon the kitchen table, while 
he fetched in the tortoise from the garden ; and 
the pair soon saw with joint delight that its im- 
pressions on the paste were almost identical with 
those upon the slabs. Genial as a hostess, sympa- 
thetic as a friend, she was not less exemplary as 
a mother. Her children, departed and surviving, 
called and call her blessed : "As good a man and 
wife," wrote Frank Buckland of his parents, "as 



PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 



39 



ever did their duty to God and their fellow- 
creatures." " Never," says her daughter, "was a 
word of evil speaking permitted. ' My dear, edu- 
cated people always talk of things, not persons; 
it is only in the servants' hall that people gossip.' " l 
He was a wonderful lecturer, clear, fluent, apt, 
overflowing with witty illustrations, dashing down 
amongst us ever and anon to enforce an intricate 
point with Samsonic wielding of a cave-bear jaw 
or a hyaena thigh bone. Of questions from his 
hearers he was intolerant ; they checked the rapids 
of his talk. " It would seem," queried a sceptical 
Caledonian during a lecture in North Britain, 
"that your animals always walked in one direc- 
tion?" "Yes," was the reply, " Cheirotherium 
was a Scotchman, and he always travelled south." 

Even more attractive than the lectures at the 
Clarendon were the field days ; the ascent of Shot- 
over, with pauses at each of its six deposits, the 
lumps of Montlivalvia hammered out from the 
coralline oolite, the selenite crystals higher up, 
the questionings over the ironsand on the summit, 
over the ochre and pipeclay on the rough moor- 
land long since ploughed into uninteresting fer- 
tility. These are undergraduate memories ; but I 
recall much earlier days, when I was wont to play 
with Frank Buckland and his brother in their 
home at the corner of Tom Quad : the entrance 
hall with its grinning monsters on the low stair- 

1 An unconscious echo of Plato : " de irepl avOptiiruv roi>j 
\6yovs iroiov/j.ei>ovs, TJKiffTa QiXoffoQig, irptirov Troiovvras" " Ever 
chattering about persons, a proceeding quite inconsistent with 
philosophy." Republic, vi. 12. 



40 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

case, of whose latent capacity to arise and fall 
upon me I never quite overcame my doubts ; the 
side-table in the dining-room covered with fossils, 
"Paws off" in large letters on a protecting card; 
the very sideboard candlesticks perched on saurian 
vertebrae ; the queer dishes garnishing the dinner 
table horseflesh I remember more than once, 
crocodile another day, mice baked in batter on 
a third while the guinea-pig under the table in- 
quiringly nibbled at your infantine toes, the bear 
walked round your chair and rasped your hand 
with file-like tongue, the jackal's fiendish yell close 
by came through the open window, the monkey's 
hairy arm extended itself suddenly over your shoul- 
der to annex your fruit and walnuts. I think the 
Doctor rather scared us ; we did not understand his 
sharp, quick voice and peremptory manner, and pre- 
ferred the company of his kind, charming, highly 
cultured wife. Others found him alarming ; dis- 
honesty and quackery of all kinds fled from that 
keen, all-knowing vision. When Tom Tower was 
being repaired, he watched the workmen from his 
window with a telescope, and frightened a scamp- 
ing mason whom he encountered descending from 
the scaffold by bidding him go back and bring 
down that faulty piece of work he had just put 
into a turret. At Palermo, on his wedding tour, 
he visited St. Rosalia's shrine, 

The grot where olives nod, 
Where, darling of each heart and eye, 
From all the youth of Sicily 

St. Rosalie retired to God. 

It was opened by the priests, and the relics of the 




DR. BUCKLAND 

The Ansdell Portrait. From Mrs. Gordons "Life of Buckland" reproduced by 
permission of the authoress and of the publisher, Mr. John Murray 




PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 41 

saint were shown. He saw that they were not 
Rosalia's : "They are the bones of a goat/' he 
cried out, "not of a woman;'' and the sanctuary 
doors were abruptly closed. 

Frank used to tell of their visit long afterwards to 
a foreign cathedral, where was exhibited a martyr's 
blood dark spots on the pavement ever fresh and 
ineradicable. The professor dropped on the pave- 
ment and touched the stain with his tongue. " I 
can tell you what it is ; it is bat's urine ! " 

I can see him now, passing rapidly through the 
quadrangle and down St. Aldate's broad-brimmed 
hat, tail coat, umbrella, great blue bag. This last 
he always carried ; it is shown in AnsdelPs portrait, 
the best likeness of him by far. Sir H. Davy once 
expected him, and, disappointed, asked his servant 
if Dr. Buckland had not called. " No, sir, there has 
been no one but a man with a bag ; he called three 
times, and I always told him you were out." His 
umbrella he was for ever losing ; not through in- 
advertence, he declared, but through larceny : he set 
up a red umbrella : that too was pirated : engraved 
finally on the handle " Stolen from Dr. Buckland," 
that met the case ; he became for the first time per- 
manently umbrelliferous. 

Suddenly, in the midst of unsurpassed energy 
and usefulness, came the blow which ended, not the 
life better perhaps had it been so but the vigour 
and beauty of the life. For eight years he lay tor- 
pid and apathetic ; the only books he would open 
were the Bible and the Leisure Hour ! His fine 
collection, with his own hammermarks and his 
wife's neat labels on every stone, he bequeathed to 



42 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

his successors in the Chair. It lies, or lay till lately, 
neglected, useless, unarranged, in the cellars of the 
Museum ; yet, if not for the sake of education and 
learning, then for the sake of sentiment and rever- 
ence, one would think that the Conscript Fathers 
might accord, if they have not yet done so, a place 
conspicuous and honoured to the traditions and the 
autographs of the first great Oxford scientist. 

A life-long friend and fellow pioneer of Daubeny 
and Buckland was Baden-Powell, who became 
Savilian Professor of Geometry in 1827. His earlier 
papers on Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics, had 
made him widely notable ; and he distinguished 
himself from a very early time by discerning and 
urging the need of University reform. Of a nature 
eagerly participative, he did much by his popular 
addresses to create an appetite for science among 
the Oxford citizens, lecturing also to Polytechnics 
and Mechanics Institutes throughout the country. 
Alone amongst the Oxford teachers of his day he 
worked out with ability and boldness, with a single- 
minded aspiration after Truth, yet in a calm and 
temperate spirit, those attractive problems of the 
relation between Science and Religion, which his 
contemporaries for the most part handled only in 
support of personal and party preconceptions, or 
shirked through fear of the odium which they were 
certain to excite. As a member of the first Uni- 
versity Commission, he did much to enforce the 
claims of Science to a prominent position in the Uni- 
^versity curriculum. He died, all too soon, in 1860. 
7 I think the only Lectures besides Buckland's which 

V drew students to a class-room were those on (t ex- 

/ \j 



PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 43 

perimental Philosophy/' as it was called ; delivered 
in the Clarendon by a cheery Mr. Walker, who 
constructed and exploded gases, laid bare the 
viscera of pumps and steam engines, forced mercury 
through wood blocks in a vacuum, manipulated 
galvanic batteries, magic-lanterns, air-guns. This 
last demonstration once, like decent David's dancing 
in "Don Juan," "excited some remark." A wicked 
wag loaded the air-gun before the professor entered, 
and when the trigger was pulled we saw some 
plaster fall from the ceiling, and a clatter was heard 
presently on the staircase. The bullet had gone up 
into the lecture-room above, and put to flight 
another professor with his pupils. Walker was a 
man of great ability ; the first, I believe, to intro- 
duce into Oxford the analytical as distinct from the 
geometrical treatment of higher mathematics. He 
was also a notable preacher of the evangelical school ; 
his sermons pure in style, and reflecting strong 
personal piety. 

A humbler philosopher in the same line was 
Thomas, a Holywell glazier, who used to give gra- 
tuitous popular lectures in the music-room to work- 
ing men, using implements and apparatus, magnets, 
galvanometers, induction coils, cleverly fashioned 
by himself. He was genuinely and widely scientific ; 
made an interesting discovery as to the thinness 
at which decomposed glass yields complemen- 
tary colours I have some of his specimens in 
my cabinet discovered that certain double salts, 
crystallised at particular temperatures, assume 
special forms and become beautiful microscopic 
objects an electrician, a naturalist, an optician, a 



44 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

discoverer, a working man. A few years later came 
another self-taught genius, Chapman, a watchmaker 
with a shop opposite Balliol, whose large and well- 
stocked marine aquarium, a thing of beauty at that 
time rare, attracted wondering visitors. He it was 
who discovered and rescued the monster Cetiosaurus 
at Kirtlington Station. He had dismounted from 
the train with his son on a botanising expedition 
just as the first fragment was disclosed by the pick- 
axe ; found the foreman, stopped the digging, tele- 
graphed for Phillips, who superintended the removal 
of the enormous bones to the Oxford Museum. 
The credit accrued to Phillips, no one mentioned 
Chapman. " The page slew the boar, the peer had 
the gloire." 

But the names of Phillips and the Museum are 
anticipatory : I must go back to clear the way for 
them. The man who made them and much else 
possible in Oxford has been dead only a few years, 
member of a family exceptional in longevity as 
in almost all besides. His advent in the early 
Forties, his regeneration of the Anatomy School at 
Christchurch, the Hope Bequest, the erection of the 
new Museum, the remarkable genius who was its 
architect, the impulse which it communicated at 
once to Science and Art, its welcome to the British 
Association, its handselling by the Great Darwin 
fight in its new Theatre from morn till dewy eve, 
when Huxley and S. Wilberforce were protagonists, 
and Henslow held the stakes, I must keep for 
another chapter. 



CHAPTER IV 

SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 

"Jam jam Efficaci do manus Sciential 

HORACE. 

Dr. Acland His Influence The New Museum Its Erection Pollen 
Woodward An Art Colony William Morris and Rossetti 
The British Association Meeting of 1860 The Darwinian Dis- 
cussion Wilberforce and the " Venerable Ape " Huxley's Reply 
The Statistician and the Symbolist After the Battle Dar- 
winism a Decade Later The Microscopical Society J. O. 
West wood. 

IN 1844 Dr. Acland, settling in Oxford as a 
physician on Dr. Wootten's early and lamented 
death, was made Lee's Reader of Anatomy at 
Christchurch. The subject had not formed part 
of University studies ; Sir Christopher Pegge had 
drawn small audiences to fluent desultory lectures ; 
Dr. Kidd, who vacated the chair to Dr. Acland, had 
published an able monograph on the anatomy of 
the mole-cricket, whose novelty moved the mirth 
of his professional brethren. The small theatre 
contained a cast of Eclipse's skeleton with a few 
dreary preparations in wax ; corpses were sent 
from the gallows for dissections, at which an 
intending medical student would now and then 
assist ; there was a tradition that the body of a 
woman hanged for murder had once, when laid 
out on the table, shown signs of life, had been 
restored by the professor, and dismissed, let us 

45 



46 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

hope to sin no more. In Oxford, or out of it, 
Invertebrate Zoology was a subject little studied, 
and Comparative Anatomy was unknown. Besides 
the regular students' course at St. George's Hospital, 
Acland had spent two valuable years in Edinburgh. 
Here he learned to handle the then unfamiliar 
microscope, and acquired under the famous Good- 
sir that insight into Comparative Anatomy and 
that conception of museum arrangement which 
were ere long to differentiate him from his medical 
brethren. The Readership of Anatomy fell vacant, 
and was offered to him by the Dean. With Good- 
sir's help he amassed preparations and slides ; along 
with Edward Forbes visited the Shetlands for 
dredging and dissection ; returned to Oxford with 
fourteen large packing cases, and set himself to 
create a little Hunterian museum on the banks 
of Isis. He employed for dissection the deft 
fingers of ]. G. Wood, then an undergraduate : 
from the yet more skilful hands of Charles 
Robertson who, under his tuition, became after- 
wards Aldrichian Demonstrator and tutor for the 
Science Schools, and whose " Zoological Series" 
gained a medal in the Exhibition of 1862 
proceeded nearly all the beautiful biological 
preparations now on the Museum shelves. The 
lectures began in 1845 ; they were delivered in 
the downstairs theatre, whence we ascended to 
the room above, to sit at tables furnished with 
little railroads on which ran microscopes charged 
with illustrations of the lecture, alternately with 
trays of coffee. A few senior men came from time 
to time, but could not force their minds into the 




SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 47 

new groove. Dr. Ogle, applying his eye to the 
microscope, screwed a quarter-inch right through 
the object; and Dr. Kidd, after examining some 
delicate morphological preparation, while his young 
colleague explained its meaning, made answer first, 
that he did not believe in it, and, secondly, that if 
it were true he did not think God meant us to 
know it. So we were mostly undergraduates ; 
and greatly we enjoyed lectures, microscopes, 
and the discussions which Dr. Acland encouraged ; 
though these last exercises were after a time sup- 
pressed, as endangering lapses into the leve et 
ludicrum. On one occasion, so fame reported, 
the men being invited to relate instances of sur- 
prising animal instinct, it was announced by an 
imaginative student, to the consteration of the 
professor, who did not appreciate jokes, that "he 
knew a man whose sister had a tame jellyfish 
which would sit up and beg." 

We discerned his weaknesses, liked him, I think, 
all the better for them, as bringing him nearer to 
ourselves. His stiff sense of rectitude, oppressive 
sometimes both to his neighbours and himself, 
obstructed the easy relation, begotten usually by 
public school and College friction, which some 
teachers establish with their pupils. For neither 
at Harrow nor at Oxford was he on clubbable 
terms with his fellows. Lacking in a sense of 
humour, he often mistook fun for levity : de- 
nounced, I remember, as "unprofitable," Sydney 
Smith's hearteasing merriment ; and his sensitive- 
ness occasionally misinterpreted an impersonal 
frolic as an intentional offence against himself. 



48 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

As he was by nature strongly emotional, the 
hysterica passio would " swell up/' as poor Lear 
says, with disconcerting suddenness. Henry Fur- 
neaux, prince of raconteurs and mimics, used to 
relate how he once burst into tears at first 
sight of a pretty little window constructed by 
Woodward in his absence : he was ill in bed for 
a week after witnessing Tom Taylor's " Joan of 
Arc " : and his broken-hearted self-tormentings over 
his own supposed religious deficiencies brought 
on him a manly rebuke from Liddell. His habit 
of assuming in argument a tone of moral supe- 
riority was wont to exasperate opponents. He 
would press his views upon his colleagues in 
conference with a sort of tremulous affectionate- 
ness the aterna mansuetudo of the Thunny Squib 
(page X I 5) breaking their heads, as Rolleston 
said, with precious balms ; then, if disappointed, 
he would be peevish, lose temper, court defeat. 
Max Miiller, asked how he had contrived to 
force through Convocation an extremely debat- 
able measure, answered, "We got Acland to speak 
against it." 

These were spots in the sun, to be recalled 
with lenient and good-humoured allowance, but 
essential to a complete understanding of the man. 

Meanwhile his teaching bore fruit; and before 
the Forties had run half their course the question 
of a Museum arose. There were Buckland's 
treasures houseless, Dr. Acland's had outgrown 
their sedem angustam, and when Hope's noble 
entomological collection, accepted together with 
its curator, had to be stored away in drawers and 




SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 49 

boxes of a room in the Taylor building, it was 
felt that the old Ashmolean must be supplanted 
by a temple worthy of the University. The pro- 
posal was vehemently denounced ; by economists 
on the ground of cost, by the old-fashioned 
classicists as intrusive, by theologians as subtly 
ministering to false doctrine, heresy, and schism. 
Sewell of Exeter strained the clerical prerogative 
of bigotry by protesting against it in a University 
sermon. Backed by Daubeny, Powell, Buckland, 
as later by Dean Liddell and Professor Phillips, 
Dr. Acland sedulously pressed it ; till early in the 
Fifties the money was voted, the design adopted, 
the first stone laid by Lord Derby, and the work 
begun due, as ought always to be remembered, 
to the initiative and persistence of Acland more 
than of any other man. Its erection popularised 
in Oxford Art no less than Science. The growth 
of artistic feeling had been for some time per- 
ceptible ; the Eldon drawings were laid out in 
the Taylor ; Mr. Combe's fine gallery of Pre- 
Raphaelites, the collections of choice engravings 
made by Griffiths of Wadham and by Manuel 
Johnson, were liberally and kindly shown ; James 
Wyatt, the picture dealer, loved to fill his High 
Street shop with Prouts and Constables and 
Havills, and an occasional Turner water-colour ; 
an exhibition of paintings at the Angel, promoted 
by Captain Strong, an accomplished amateur, 
brought out unknown talent and drew the artists 
together. Millais was often in Oxford as the guest 
of Mr. Drury at Shotover ; Holman Hunt was 
working in Mr. Combe's house at "The Light of 






50 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

the World," brought with him from Chelsea ; nor 
can any one who knew young Venables, curate of 
St. Paul's, an intimate with the Combes, doubt 
whence, consciously or unconsciously, Hunt drew 
the face of his Christ. 

Another pioneer of Art was John Hungerford 
Pollen, Fellow of Merton. Calling on friends 
and finding the oak sported, he would leave his 
card in the form of pencil drawings on the stair- 
case-wall without. Once at New College, when 
these walls were being newly coloured, we made 
intercession with the Bursar to leave untouched 
the sacer paries adjoining William Heathcote's 
rooms, which were inwrought with vigorous de- 
lineations of "Civitas Bethlehem, TTO?U? Nazareth, 
Urbs Jerusalem," from Pollen's pencil. He was 
a far - and - wide traveller, and with congenial 
friends would pour forth his experiences and 
show his sketches. Heathcote used to tell how 
one evening at the Skenes, when Miss Skene, a 
fine Handelian singer, was emulating the coyness 
of Sardus Tigellius, Pollen offered, if she would 
sing " Waft her Angels," to execute the Muezzin's 
call to prayer. This he did in perfection, sitting 
cross-legged on the floor with rocking body and 
resonant ascending drawling cry. He left his 
monument in the painted ceiling of Merton 
Chapel. I used to go in and watch him at 
work, recumbent all day long upon a scaffolding, 
his brush busy, and his black hair showing against 
the white blouse he wore. The cherubs filling the 
medallion were drawn from Magdalen Choristers : 
one was my brother, afterwards Rector of Stand- 




WOODWARD, ARCHITECT OF THE MUSEUM 
From a Photograph 



SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 51 

lake, another was Charles Corfe, son to the Christ- 
church organist ; the Madonna was his mother, 
Mrs. Corfe ; one of the angels was a Miss Smythe. 
Eight years after, when long cut off from College 
life, he came with Rossetti to decorate Wood- 
ward's Union Debating Room, his contribution 
being Arthur's investment with the brand Ex- 
calibur. We were all prepared for his secession 
in his Proctor's year, nor surprised to read in 
The Times one day that he had joined the Church 
of Rome. Two days later came a characteristic 
note from him to the premature journal: "As 
the statement is untrue, you will have the good- 
ness to contradict it." Delane apologised, and 
gave up his informer, Oakley, who sent in his 
turn a furious remonstrance, which The Times 
snubbed. The report was untimely, that was all ; 
he left us shortly afterwards. 

Then into our midst came Woodward, architect 
of the Museum, a man of rare genius and deep 
artistic knowledge, beautiful in face and character, 
but with the shadow of an early death already 
stealing over him. He was a grave and curiously 
silent man : of his partners, men greatly his in- 
feriors, the elder, Sir Thomas Deane, was a cease- 
less chatterbox, the younger, son to Sir Thomas, 
stammered. Speaking in Congregation, Jeune hit 
off the trio after his manner : " One won't talk, one 
can't talk, one never stops talking." Woodward 
brought with him his Dublin pupils, drew round 
him eager Oxonians, amongst them Morris and 
Burne-Jones, not long come up to Exeter. The 
lovely Museum rose before us like an exhalation ; 



52 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

its every detail, down to panels and footboards, 
gas-burners and door handles, an object lesson in 
art, stamped with Woodward's picturesque inven- 
tiveness and refinement. Not before had ironwork 
been so plastically trained as by Skidmore in the 
chestnut boughs and foliage which sustained the 
transparent roof : the shafts of the interior arcades, 
representing in their sequence the succession of 
British rocks, sent us into the Radcliffe Library 
for the mastery of geological classification; every 
morning came the handsome red-bearded Irish 
brothers Shea, bearing plants from the Botanic 
Garden, to reappear under their chisels in the 
rough-hewn capitals of the pillars. 

" Nor herb nor flow'ret glistened there 
But was carved in the cloister arches as fair." 

It seemed that Art was in the air : Mrs. Bar- 
tholomew Price, with Miss Cardwell's aid, painted 
her St. Giles' drawing-room in no Philistine taste ; 
the graceful sunshade work outside Dr. Acland's 
windows found imitation in many another street ; 
Ruskin, whose books in 1850 Sewell, the librarian 
of my College, refused to purchase for the library, 
was read as he had not been read before ; while he 
himself hovered about to bless the Museum work, 
to offer cheques, and to suggest improvements 
which silent Woodward sometimes smiling put by. 
The Committee of the Union authorised Wood- 
ward to build a debating-room, to decorate which 
alas ! upon untempered mortar ! came down 
Rossetti and Val Prinsep, and Hughes and Stan- 
hope, and Pollen, and Monro the sculptor. A 




SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 53 

merry, rollicking set they were : I was working 
daily in the Library, which at that time opened into 
the gallery of the new room, and heard their laugh- 
ter and songs and jokes and the volleys of their 
soda-water corks ; for this innutrient fluid was 
furnished to them without stint at the Society's 
expense, and the bill from the Star Hotel close by 
amazed the treasurer. It was during this visit that 
Morris and Rossetti, with Rogers, a pupil of Wood- 
ward, hunting in the parish churches on Sunday 
evenings to find a Guinevere, met with the handsome 
girl who became afterwards the wife of William 
Morris and Rossetti's cherished friend. I well re- 
member her sister and herself; she survives in 
sacred widowhood. 

At last the Museum was so far finished as to 
receive the British Association of 1860. Sections 
fell conveniently into the lecture-rooms : the area, 
not yet filled with cases, held the evening gather- 
ings ; and the large Library, devoid of books 
and shelves, was dedicated to the Darwinian dis- 
cussion, the great event of the week. The room 
filled early, and we waited long. Owen was to 
take the chair, but did not come ; he was replaced 
by an unclerical-looking man in black, whom we 
in Oxford knew not, but whom all Cambridge 
honoured as Professor Henslow. The attack on 
Darwin's book was to be led by the Bishop of 
Oxford, who had written in the last Quarterly a 
denunciatory article inspired by Owen, and Huxley 
was to head the defence. The Bishop came late, 
trampling his way through the dense crowd to his 
place upon the platform, his face no longer re- 



54 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

fined and spiritual as in the early Richmond por- 
trait ; coarsened somewhat, even plebeianised, by 
advancing years, but resourceful, pugnacious, im- 
pregnable, not a little arrogant. On the chairman's 
other side sat Huxley ; hair jet black and thick, 
slight whiskers, pale full fleshy face, the two strong 
lines of later years already marked, an ominous 
quiver in his mouth, and an arrow ready to come 
out of it. For a moment Daubeny beamed on us 
at the upper door, inviting all at three o'clock to 
his experimental garden on the Iffley Road. Pro- 
fessor Draper of New York, eminent, serious, nasal, 
read a paper on Evolution ; then, during an ex- 
pectant pause, out came the Derby dog in the 
person of old " Dicky " Greswell of Worcester, who, 
with great eyes, vast white neckcloth, luminous 
bald head and spectacles, rising and falling rhyth- 
mically on his toes, opined that all theories as to 
the ascent of man were vitiated by the fact, un- 
doubted but irrelevant, that, in the words of Pope, 
Great Homer died three thousand years ago. 
Another pause, an appeal from the chairman to 
Huxley, his sarcastic response that he certainly held 
a brief for Science, but had not yet heard it assailed. 
Then up got Wilberforce, argumentative, rheto- 
rical, amusing ; retraced the ground of his article, 
distinguished between a " working and a causal 
hypothesis," complimented " Professor Huxley 
who is about to demolish me," plagiarised from a 
mountebank sermon by Burgon, expressing the 
" disquietude " he should feel were a " venerable 
ape " to be shown to him as his ancestress in the 
Zoo : a piece of clever, diverting, unworthy clap- 




PROFESSOR HUXLEY 

From a Photograph taken at the Meeting of the British Association, 1860 




SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE $J 

trap. Huxley rose, white with anger. " I should 
be sorry to demolish so eminent a prelate, but for 
myself I would rather be descended from an ape 
than from a divine who employs authority to stifle 
truth." A gasp and shudder through the room, the 
scientists uneasy, the orthodox furious, the Bishop 
wearing that fat, provoking smile which once, as 
Osborne Gordon reminds us, 1 impelled Lord Derby 
in the House of Lords to an unparliamentary 
quotation from " Hamlet." " I am asked," Huxley 
went on, "if I accept Mr. Darwin's book as a 
complete causal hypothesis. Belated on a roadless 
common in a dark night, if a lantern were offered 
to me, should I refuse it because it shed imperfect 
light ? I think not I think not." He met Wilber- 
force's points, not always effectively, not entirely at 
his ease; the "venerable ape's" rude arms were 
choking him. The Bishop radiantly purged him- 
self. He did not mean to hurt the Professor's 
feelings ; it was our fault we had laughed, and 
that made him pursue the joke. We laughed again, 
and Huxley was not appeased. 

Another pause, broken by a voice from the crowd 
of a grey-haired, Roman-nosed, elderly gentleman. 
It was Admiral Fitzroy, and men listened ; but 
when they found he had nothing more to say than 
that Darwin's book had given him acutest pain, the 
irreverent cry of "Question " silenced him. Another 
voice from the far end of the long room : a stout 
man waved and slapped a blue-book ; told us that 
he was no naturalist but a statistician, and that if 
you could prove Darwin's theories you could prove 
1 Page 154, note. 



56 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

anything. A roar of displeasure proclaimed the 
meeting's inaptitude at that moment for statistics, 
and the stout man made his exit with a defiant 
remonstrance. Now, we thought, for business ; 
but no, there was another act of comedy. From 
the back of the platform emerged a clerical gentle- 
man, asking for a blackboard. It was produced, 
and amid dead silence he chalked two crosses at its 
opposite corners, and stood pointing to them as if 
admiring his achievement. We gazed at him, and 
he at us, but nothing came of it, till suddenly the 
absurdity of the situation seemed to strike the 
whole assembly simultaneously, and there went 
up such an aa-fiea-ros <ye\a>s as those serious walls 
would, henceforth, never hear. Again and again the 
laughter pealed, as purposeless laughter is wont to 
do ; under it the artist and his blackboard were gently 
persuaded to the rear, and we saw him no more. 
He was discovered to be a Cornish parson, scientifi- 
cally minded ; but what his hieratics meant or what 
he wished to say remains inscrutable, the thought 
he had in him, as Carlyle says of the long-flowing 
Turk who represented the human species at the heels 
of Anacharsis Clootz, conjectural to this day. 

So at last the fight began, with words strong 
on either side, and arguments long since super- 
annuate ; so all day long the noise of battle rolled. 
The younger men were on the side of Darwin, the 
older men against him ; Hooker led the devotees, 
Sir Benjamin Brodie the malcontents ; till the 
sacred dinner-hour drew near. Henslow dismissed 
us with an impartial benediction, College Halls 
and hospitable homes received both combatants 




SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 57 

and audience ; nor had Daubeny any visitors to 
his experimental garden. Next day I met Rolleston, 
and asked after Huxley's symptoms. " In my 
room," said he, "hang portraits of Huxley, and 
of S. Oxon. When I came down this morning 
I give you my word that Huxley's photograph 
had turned yellow." Ten years later I encountered 
him, anything but yellow, at the Exeter meeting 
of the Association. Again there was a bitter assault 
on Darwinism, this time by a Scottish doctor of 
divinity ; with smiling serenity Huxley smote him 
hip and thigh, the audience, hostile or cold at 
Oxford, here ecstatically acquiescent. The decade 
had worked its changes : Darwin and Evolution, 
fighting in their courses against Inscience and 
Prejudice, had subdued the popular mind. Philistia 
herself was glad of them. 

In Oxford for a time after this science was 
tolerated sceptically rather than cordially welcomed. 
"Brodie has done it at last, gentlemen," laughed 
Chaffers cheerfully to his Brasenose pupils, when 
during lecture was heard a tremendous explosion 
issuing, as it turned out, from the new heating 
apparatus at St. Mary's, not from the Glastonbury 
laboratory. At this day, according to Professor 
Ray Lankester, it receives an indecently inadequate 
proportion either of recognition or emolument. 
Conservatism hated it as novel, Orthodoxy feared 
it as emancipating ; even men like Jowett l pro- 
claimed war against it on behalf of the "ancient 
studies," as encroaching on and menacing the 
" higher conception of knowledge and of the mind," 
1 " Life and Letters of Jowett," vol. ii. p. 268. 



58 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

as antagonistic to " morals and religion and philo- 
sophy and history and language" curiously un- 
aware that their own avowed ignorance of its 
nature, subjects, tendencies, precluded them from 
forming, much more from expressing, an opinion. 
Nevertheless, before the decade was far advanced 
science established itself in Oxford. The Museum 
buildings formed an object lesson which it was 
impossible to overlook; their contents, laid out 
and labelled, their minerals, fossils, insects, zoo- 
logical specimens and preparations, appealed to 
the naturalist instinct which from many natures 
school and college had not quite extirpated ; pro- 
fessors came amongst us, men already stamped 
with classical University distinction, Rolleston, 
Brodie, Balfour ; or, like Mrs. Bayham Badger's 
second husband, " men of European reputation," 
such as dear old Phillips. The splendid show of 
microscopes at the British Association conversa- 
zione had excited interest and emulation ; and 
when in 1861 an enthusiastic young New College 
naturalist projected a Microscopical Society the 
idea was warmly taken up. Dr. Acland was its 
first president, and delivered an inaugural address ; 
it met and worked regularly, with papers and 
discussions, systematic investigation of the rich 
Oxford microscopic fauna, periodical exhibitions 
in the Museum, which drew large audiences and 
laid wide foundations. 

Conspicuous at these gatherings was the famous 
entomologist and very lovable personage, ]. O. 
Westwood, who had come to Oxford in the late 
Forties as controller of Mr. Hope's collection. As 



SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 59 

far as I know, he has never been memorialised in 
print, and I may appropriately end this science 
chapter with a brief tribute to his memory. His 
claim to eminence was not only biological ; he was 
also a specialist in the archaeology and palaeography 
of art, the highest living authority on fictile ivories 
and inscribed stones. Born and brought up a 
Quaker, he was apprenticed to an engraver, acquir- 
ing the power of accurate delineation which enabled 
him so graphically to illustrate his various works. 
Articled for a time to a London solicitor and after- 
wards a partner in the firm, he was persuaded by 
Mr. Hope to remove to Oxford, first as curator of 
the Hope collection, then as earliest occupant of the 
Natural History Chair which Hope was founding ; 
and at Oxford Westwood remained till his death. 
Sprung from the ranks, and a late-born son of the 
University, he received scant welcome from the 
Dons ; the exclusiveness of that time being further 
aggravated by his Nonconformist origin and 
opinions, until rebuked by Richard Michell, the 
Public Orator, who reminded his friends that their 
new colleague was "not sectarian but insectarian." 
The good-humoured simplicity of his manner and 
his unfailing amiability to all who sought enlighten- 
ment in his department soon won men's hearts, and 
he became as popular as he deserved to be. 

I knew him not till 1860. Attracted by a jar 
containing live specimens of the uncommon and 
beautiful Cheirocephalus diaphanus, which I had 
found in a rain-water pool near the Headington 
Asylum, and had sent to a natural history exhibition 
at the Town Hall, he begged me to call on him at 



60 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

the Museum ; and finding that I was studying the 
Coleoptera, placed at my disposal books and speci- 
mens; sparing no pains to encourage and assist me. 
I happened to be dexterous in microscopical pre- 
paration, and he urged the Museum Delegates to 
employ me in mounting a series of insect anatomies 
after a conception of his own; but the plan fell 
through. His own technique was as remarkable 
as his knowledge ; with no tools except scissors, 
forceps, lens, camel-hair brush, gum tragacanth, 
and colour box, he performed miracles of dissection 
and restoration. I remember his falling from a 
ladder in the Library, and crushing in his breast- 
pocket a pill-box containing a rare beetle. The 
ruin seemed hopeless, the insect a powder of frag- 
ments; but he set to work at once, and next day 
showed me the beetle restored to all its former 
beauty. His unerring instinct in diagnosing and 
locating a new species was made the subject of a 
practical joke. Some saucy young entomologists 
obtained a chocolate beetle, made and coloured 
under their directions, from a famous shop in Paris, 
and sent it to Westwood for identification fixed in a 
glass-topped box. He wrote that without handling 
it he could not be certain of the genus, but that it 
was a tetramerous beetle belonging to the family 
Cerambycidce. The useful letter "h " he never suc- 
ceeded in pronouncing. He once asked Mansel 
who was St. Bee. Remembering his peculiarity, 
Mansel answered that he was a near kinsman of 
St. 'Ives. At an electoral contest between Mr. 
Gladstone and Mr. Hardy, Westwood, coming in 
late, hurried and breathless, announced his vote for 




SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 61 

" Glad , no, no, I mean 'Ardy." Henry Smith 

claimed the vote for Gladstone. "Why," said the 
Vice-Chancellor, "he only pronounced the first 
syllable of Mr. Gladstone's name." "Yes, sir; 
but he did not pronounce the first letter of Mr. 
Hardy's." 

He left more than one standard work : in science, 
the "Modern Classification of Insects," and a beau- 
tiful but costly monograph of "British Moths 
and Butterflies " ; in art, the " Palaeographia Sacra 
Pictoria," with " Miniatures and Ornaments of 
Anglo-Saxon and Irish MSS.," and the monumental 
" Lapidarium Walliae." He was President of the 
Entomological Society, and received the Royal 
Society's gold medal. We felt when he passed away 
that a zoological professor as good, perhaps better, 
might be found ; but that the minutely accom- 
plished entomologist, holding in mind's eye and 
memory all the discovered and named insects in all 
the museums of the world, accessible from his fluent 
colloquial French and German to every Continental 
scientist, ready ever to display and expound his 
treasures, patiently to the unlearned, enthusi- 
astically to the accomplished visitor, could probably 
never be replaced. Men said of him, as was said of 
Richelieu when he died, " II laisse plus de vide qu'il 
n'a tenu de place." Entering the familiar room, I 
shall never cease to miss and to recall regretfully 
the short figure, shrewd kindly eye, welcoming 
voice, long wave of snow white hair and beard, 
which went to form the outward man of J. O. 
Westwood. 



CHAPTER V 

AESCULAPIUS IN THE THIRTIES 

" This is the Prince of Leeches : fever, plague, 
Cold rheum, and hot podagra, do but look on him, 
And quit their grasp upon the tortured sinews" 

WALTER SCOTT. 

An Oxford Medical Directory Pegge Wall Bourn Kidd Ireland 
West Wood Tuckwell A Picturesque Survival A Friend 
of Abernethy His Wonderful Memory His jeux d'esprit 
The Last of the Old School. 

" LONG and lasting," says Lockhart in his now for- 
gotten " Reginald Dalton," while he recounts the 
blood-letting of an Oxford town 'and gown row 
" long and lasting shall be the tokens of its wrath 
long shall be the faces of Pegge, Wall, Kidd, and 
light shall be their hearts, as they walk their rounds 
to-morrow morning long shall be the stately stride 
of Ireland, and long the clyster-pipe of West long 
and deep shall be the probing of thy skilful lancet, 
O Tuckwell ; and long shall be all your bills, and 
long, very long, shall it be ere some of them are 
paid." Lockhart wrote in the Twenties, but most of 
his doctors were walking their rounds ten years 
later ; walking, for Oxford was a small place then, 
and our medicos performed their ambarvalia on 
foot. Sir Christopher Pegge was a showy, hand- 
some man, a Fellow of Oriel in Oriel's prime of 

reputation ; he had no great practice, but as 

62 



^ISCULAPIUS IN THE THIRTIES 63 

Regius Professor drew men to his spirited lectures. 
Though comparatively young, he wore the old- 
fashioned cocked hat and wig, with the massive 
gold-headed cane, which his successor, Dr. Kidd 
a sensible, homely creature was the first medical 
professor to abandon. Kidd, Wall, Bourn were the 
popular physicians of the decade. Kidd was a little 
man, trotting about the streets in a " spencer," a 
tailless greatcoat then becoming obsolete, and worn 
only by himself and Dr. Macbride. Bourn was an 
insinuating, smiling, soft-voiced man "Have we 
any report from the bowels?" was his regular 
whispered question to lady patients suffering from 
what Epimenides the Cretan called ryao-re/w apyai. 
Wall I cannot recall, but I remember his widow 
and Bourn's, picturesque old ladies in black velvet 
and lace, whose card-parties, preceded by formal 
tea and closed by substantial suppers, attracted the 
clever genial men and women whom I have earlier 
mentioned. Dr. Ogle, father to a distinguished 
Fellow of Lincoln, who died all too early, lived on 
into the early Fifties ; as did Kidd, with two droll 
little daughters something like himself. Eden, when 
Vicar of St. Mary's, once invited the pair to tea ; 
stuffed them with cake and muffin; for a tea 
was a square meal in those days dismissed them 
with the farewell, which they received in the 
belief that it was a religious pastoral benediction : 

Ite domum, Satura, venit Hesperus, ite, Capellce. 

Ireland represented the " matriculated apothe- 
caries" of that date, men who, like the elder Pen- 
dennis in his lowly days, made up their own 



64 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

medicines, attended ladies at the most interesting 
period of their lives, sold Epsom salts, blisters, hair 
powder, across the counter of the shops which they 
called their surgeries. Some remained humble to 
the end; not so Ireland, who somehow obtained a 
Scotch degree, discarded the surgery, and set up a 
brass plate as Dr. Ireland on his house in Penny- 
farthing Street. He was a grandiloquent, pompous 
man; Lockhart's " stately stride" exactly hits him 
off. I remember his swing along the street with 
cane held at attention ; recall his stalking into my 
mother's drawing-room with his new honour fresh 
upon him, and bespeaking her congratulations on 
the fact that he would "enter the Kingdom of 
Heaven as a Doctor of Medicine." I saw him later 
in extreme old age ; he said that he was ninety-nine 
years old he was nothing like so old but he 
added, with his hands aloft, "My memory is in 
ruins." He deserved credit, however, for discover- 
ing the mathematical talent of his servant lad Abram 
Robertson, who became afterwards Professor of 
Astronomy. West was his partner tall, gentle- 
manlike, gold-spectacled, married to the daughter 
of a rich and notable Alderman Fletcher, whose 
hands continued to hold her cards long after they 
had ceased, through rheumatism, to be for other 
purposes prehensile. West's partner again and 
subsequent successor was Wood, father to the natu- 
ralist, who lived in the fine corner house opposite 
the King's Arms, built by Vanbrugh, and destroyed 
to make way for the Indian Institute. 

But by far the most conspicuous and interesting 
of Lockhart's Hakims was Tuckwell, for thirty years 





MR. TUCKWELL, SURGEON 
From a Water-Colour Drawing by J. F. Wood, 1833 



AESCULAPIUS IN THE THIRTIES 65 

from 1815 to 1845 the leading Oxford surgeon. 
In costume and demeanour he was a survival from 
the more picturesque and ceremonious past. He 
pervaded Oxford in a claret-coloured tail coat with 
velvet collar, canary waistcoat with gilt buttons, 
light brown trousers, two immense white cravats 
propping and partly covering the chin, a massive 
well-brushed beaver hat. 1 His manner and address 
were extraordinarily winning ; a contemporary de- 
scribed him to me long ago, in a letter which I 
happened to preserve, as " the most fascinating 
man I ever met, a favourite with all who knew 
him ; his cheery brightness invaluable in a sick 
room, supported as it was by his high repute and 
skill." Mr. Abernethy, discontinuing practice, en- 
treated him to take his place ; he was, said Sir 
Benjamin Brodie to me in 1853, "one of the 
cleverest surgeons of his day." He was not a 
member of the University, but had been educated 
at the then famous Aynho Grammar School, whose 
eccentric master, Mr. Leonard, was known for his 
scholarship and for his addiction to green tea, 
which he kept ever by his side to moisten his 
construes in Tacitus and Horace. So Tuckwell 
knew his Latin books minutely, and could quote 
them effectively. He was pupil to Abernethy, who 
became much attached to him; his dinner table 
after his marriage held a magnificent epergne, 
a wedding present from the famous surgeon. 
Amongst his comrades were the lads known 

1 Beaver. There were no silk hats until late in the Thirties. 
The beaver cost two guineas ; only gentlemen wore them. New 
College men of that day were known by their unbrushed hats. 

E 



66 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

afterwards as Dr. Skey and Sir George Burrows. 
He worked hard at his profession, and made him- 
self a proficient besides in French, Spanish, and 
Italian. He went to Oxford, without introduction, 
friends, or money, about 1808, but rose rapidly 
into practice, establishing himself in the house 
opposite Magdalen elms, which a very few old 
Oxford men still associate with his name, and 
which was to bear in later years the door-plate 
of his son. His name is not only embalmed 
in Lockhart's novel, but points the moral of a 
bitter passage in the " Oxford Spy " : 

" If tutors punish what they seldom shun, 
Severe to all who do as they have done 
Their wild career at once pursue, condemn ; 
Give fees to Tuckwell, and advice to them." 

It was, as we have seen, the day of early dinners, 
late suppers, nightly cards. Ombre had gone out ; 
though it was said that old Miss Horseman could 
still illustrate Belinda's game, and unfold the mys- 
teries of Manille and Matador. Quadrille, piquet, 
whist, were the games in vogue ; and at the last 
two Tuckwell was said to be one of the best 
players in England. David Gregorie, the Queen's 
Square magistrate, invited him to a three nights' 
contest at piquet. It took place at Oxford, in 
a select gathering of experts, and Gregorie re- 
turned to London three hundred pounds the 
poorer. He was no less skilful as a chess player, 
having learned from the famous Sarratt, the great 
chess teacher, whose fee was a guinea a lesson ; 
and founding the club already mentioned in these 




AESCULAPIUS IN THE THIRTIES 67 

papers. The marvellous memory which explains 
his prowess at cards was shown in his power of 
quoting poetry. Few men could beat him in 
capping verses; those present with him at a 
large party were challenged to write down the 
titles of Shakespeare's plays; all tried, but he 
alone succeeded. The story I am about to relate 
seems incredible, but I heard it long ago from not 
a few independent witnesses. A bet was laid, and 
heavy odds taken against it, that he would repeat 
ten consecutive lines from any one place at which 
he might be set on in Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, 
or Lope de Vega. The bet was won. What pro- 
verbs and riddles were to Solomon and his cour- 
tiers, that were impromptus and epigrams to the 
lively convives of that pleasant time. A lady sang 
one night a pretty Italian song by Metastasio, and 
the company appealed to him for a translation. 
He hastily pencilled it as follows : 

" Gentle Zephyr, ah ! if e'er 

Thou meetst the Mistress of my heart, 
Tell her thou'rt a sigh sincere, 

But never say whose sigh thou art. 
Limpid Rivulet, ah ! if e'er 

Thy murmuring waters near her glide, 
Say thou'rt swelled by many a tear, 

But not whose eyes those tears supplied." 

Catherine Fanshawe's poem on the letter H created 
much excitement when it appeared. 1 It was dis- 
cussed one evening in his presence, and a Miss 
Harriett Lee, a very clever girl afterwards Mrs. 

1 Appendix D. 



68 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Wingfield, of Tickencote Hall disparaged it. " It's 
no great thing," she said ; " Tuckwell would have 
done it just as well." Next morning he carried 
to her these lines on the letter W : 

" Its existence began with this World full of tears, 
And it first in the Work of Creation appears. 
In the Whirlwind we feel and acknowledge its power, 
And its influence hail in each soft falling Shower. 
Its presence the Woods and the Waters must own, 
And 'tis found in the Dwelling of monarch and clown. 
It will never forsake us in Want or in Woe, 
And is heard in each Word that can comfort bestow. 
It dwells with the Wealthy, the Witty, the Wise, 
Yet assistance to Wretchedness never denies. 
'Twill be found in the Sweets of each opening flower, 
And hangs on each Dewdrop at twilight's soft hour. 
In the mournful Farewell if you hear it with pain, 
In the sweet sound of Welcome 'twill meet you again. 
'Tis the prop of our Laws, and the guide of our Will, 
Which without it would lead us to nothing but 111. 
It begins every Wish, every View it must bound, 
And still to our Welfare essential is found. 
In the last dying Whisper of man it shall rise, 
And assist us with Wings to ascend to the skies ; 
'Midst the Wonders of Nature its form we shall view, 
Until lost in the Wreck which shall Chaos renew." 

His heart was as large as his brain was keen ; if 
he fascinated his equals, he no less won the love 
and gratitude of his humbler neighbours. During 
the thirty years of his celebrity his doors stood 
open for the first two hours of every over-busy day 
to the poor who chose to come, and who streamed 
in from the country round to be tended without 
a fee. He devoted to their care gratuitously the 
same minute and searching skill, the same unerring 






AESCULAPIUS IN THE THIRTIES 69 

memory and rapid judgment, the same urbane and 
cordial presence, which had made him popular 
and fashionable among those who were glad to 
pay him highly for these gifts ; and when the large 
heart ceased to beat and the keen brain to toil, 
while amongst a troop of friendly mourners I fol- 
lowed his remains along streets darkened by the 
signs of universal sorrow, I saw the crowd of poor 
to be counted, it was said, by hundreds gathered 
in from village and from slum for a final tribute to 
the friend who had dispensed among them health 
and healing through so many years. He was the 
last of the old Oxford school ; the " Brilliant Man " 
to quote from Henry Bulwer amongst his Uni- 
versity compeers, as was Canning among a wider 
and more high-placed set. He retained the " grand 
manner " of a fading age ; the refined and pointed, 
not conventional and effusive, courtesy to women ; 
the bounteous fund of ever-ready talk, alternating 
not monologist, seasoned not swamped with 
allusion, recitation, epigram. They played as 
well as worked, those fine old fellows luserunt 
satis atque biberunt lost and won their guineas 
gaily, chirruped their genial wit and anecdote, laid 
the ghosts of eating cares in floods of generous 
" Comet " port, which enriched and liberated, 
never dulled or overfraught, their brains. Some 
of us love them for it the more ; let the " sicci " 
who start away from wine, the purists who spy 
sin in cards, remember that behind this radiant 
conviviality the higher virtues walked their round, 
moral excellence hand in hand with mental 
power ; that often, as in Tuckwell's case, the day 



yo REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

which culminated in joyous revelry began in self- 
devoted altruism, bidding us as our record closes 
turn from the catalogue of professional and social 
triumphs to 

" That best portion of a good man's life, 
His little, nameless, unremembered acts 
Of kindness and of love." 



CHAPTER VI 

CALLIOPE IN THE THIRTIES 

" The sound 

Of instruments that made melodious chime 
Was heard, of Harp and Organ ; and who moved 
Their chords and stops was seen ; his volant touch 
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant Fugue" 

MILTON. 

Early Amateurs Blanco White Newman The Bewildered Butler 
Musicians a Caste apart A Notable Organist Jonathan Sawell 
the Singer A Letter from the Eighteenth Century Jullien The 
Amateur Society Oxford becomes Musical " Gregorian" Music 
Jenny Lind's Visit Sir Frederick Ouseley Sir John Stainer. 

WHEN Music, heavenly maid, was young in the 
last century, she had few votaries in academic 
Oxford. The traditions of the place were against 
her ; to be musical was bad form. There was 
once, to be sure, a Dean of Christchurch who 
wrote charming glees and catches, and respectable 
church music ; but the solecisms of Dean Aldrich 
were expiated by his successor, Cyril Jackson, who 
pronounced that a boy "with no more ear nor a 
stone nor no more voice nor an ass " would make 
an excellent chorister ; and by Gaisford, who ap- 
pointed as singing men worn-out scouts and bed- 
makers. In the Twenties and Thirties there were 
probably not half - a - dozen amateurs in Oxford. 
Blanco White was a violinist, so was Newman ; 
and his noble passage on the Inspiration of Music, 






72 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

with its curious slip as to fourteen notes in the 
scale, has become a locus classicus y 1 but he records 
the bewilderment of the Provost's butler, when, 
sent to announce his election at Oriel, he found 
the new Fellow playing on the fiddle, and inquired 
anxiously if he had not mistaken the rooms or 
come to the wrong person. Donkin played both the 
violin and the piano ; George Rowden of New Col- 
lege was one of the best double-bass performers in 
England : together with Donkin, Menzies, Driffield, 
Clifton, and Judge Bayliss, who in his Qist year 
still survives, he helped to form a Brasenose Har- 
monic Society, which practised and gave concerts. 
Now and then at the evening parties of the Heads 
a gifted lady would, with Handel, Haydn, or 
Mozart, compel, like Milton's nightingale, pleased 
silence ; but from these gatherings music, as en- 
croaching upon cards, was for the most part ostra- 
cised. Even so late as 1846 Max Muller, fresh from 
musical Leipzig, found that no young man, even if 
qualified, would stoop to the music-stool in public, 
and that to ask a Don to play " would have been 
considered an insult " ; while Halle", visiting England 
two years later, tells us that for a gentleman to be 
able to play upon the piano was looked upon as a 
sign of effeminacy, almost of vice. For by here- 

1 His sister challenged the passage in writing to him : 
"What do you mean by fourteen notes?" He answers : "I 
had already been amused and provoked to find my gross 
blunder about the 4 fourteen.' Pray do not suppose I doubled 
the notes for semitones, though it looks very like it. The truth 
is, I had a most stupid idea in my head that there were fifteen 
semitones, and took off one for the octave. On reading it 
over when published I saw the absurdity." " Letters and Cor- 
respondence," vol. ii. p. 411. 



CALLIOPE IN THE THIRTIES 73 

ditary prejudice the professional musician was 
looked upon as an inferior, to be paid for his 
services, to be kept socially at a distance. Prince 
Hal bore much from Falstaff, but broke his head 
for likening his father to a singing man at Windsor; 
Mrs. Thrale, we know, was deserted and de- 
nounced by all her friends, including ungrateful 
Fanny Burney, for marrying the blameless music- 
master, Piozzi. Stately Dr. Williams, when Head- 
master of Winchester, took to hair-powder because 
a lady mistook him for a bass singer in the cathe- 
dral ; I shall recall later on the consternation felt 
among the older men of Oxford, when Ouseley, 
baronet, gentleman commoner, Master of Arts, 
condescended to become Doctor of Music ; and 
we all remember Mr. Osborne's contempt for the 
" Honourables" to whom his daughter introduced 
him " Lords, indeed? Why, at one of her 
swarreys I saw one of 'em speak to a dam fiddler, 
a fellar I despise." 

So music was relegated contemptuously to a 
quasi-professional set, the chaplains, singing men, 
Bible clerks, of the three choral Colleges ; its 
Doctorate was a sham, the graduates not admitted 
to the sacred scarlet semicircle in the Theatre ; its 
Professor, with a salary of 12 a year, appearing 
only at Commemoration to play the ramshackle old 
organ in the Theatre. The Professor at that time 
was Sir Henry Bishop, composer of deservedly 
popular part-songs, but inferior as a musician to his 
very eminent predecessor, Dr. Crotch. Of the 
three organists only one was notable, Dr. Stephen 
Elvey of New College, a good harmonist, an enthu- 



74 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

siastic Handelian, though the loss of a leg prevented 
him from playing pedal fugues, but of rough manner 
and suspicious temper. On the death of his first 
wife he had married, with rather unusual prompti- 
tude, a pretty girl known as Perdita amongst the 
New College undergraduates, who used to crowd 
the " Slipe" gate on Sundays after service in order to 
see her pass from Holywell Church. He presided 
shortly afterwards at a concert, and the wag who 
arranged its programme had inserted a glee by 
his brother George, which appeared in the bill as 
" Ah ! Why so soon Elvey ? " 

I remember the performance of Sir George 
Elvey's Bachelor's exercise in the Music Room, I 
think in 1838, when Stephen Elvey conducted in 
the splendid robes which I then for the first time 
saw, the new Bachelor sitting at the piano. The 
choral services in the Chapels were not of a high 
order, though individual voices of special sweetness 
kept up their popularity. The finest adult singer 
of that time was Jonathan Sawell, chaplain of New 
College and Magdalen, who possessed the rare pure 
Mario-like tenor, almost touching alto in the higher 
range. He long survived his voice, singing with 
husky wooden notes into the Fifties ; a cheery, 
popular fellow, and an admirable oar ; he and 
Moon of Magdalen, son to Alderman or Lord Mayor 
Moon, placed on the river the first outrigger skiffs 
seen at Oxford. His window in Magdalen, opposite 
to the Physic Garden, was always beautifully floral ; 
an adornment long since universal, peculiar then to 
him and to Dr. Peter Maurice of New College. As 
for the chorister boys, they ran wild. Their nominal 




CALLIOPE IN THE THIRTIES 75 

master at Magdalen was an elderly Fellow, George 
Grantham, who came to a tragic end, falling out of 
his window at bedtime into the deer park, and 
found there next morning by his scout, dead with 
a broken neck, the deer crowding round him in an 
alarmed circle. His grave, with G. G. incised, is in 
the corner of the cloisters between the chapel 
door and the window opposite. There was a fire 
in the antechapel at that time, and the surpliced 
boys used as they passed it to deposit chestnuts and 
potatoes, which they recovered, matura et coda, when 
they came out. The New College brats were not 
under better discipline. Many years ago, while 
lionising some strangers in the Chapel, I observed 
that the plaster wing of a sham oak angel had been 
broken off, and from the crevice behind protruded 
a piece of paper. I drew it out, yellow, stained, 
and creased. I suppose that interest accrues even 
to trivial personal records when ripened by the 
lapse of years. We take no note to-day of a child's 
naked footprint on the sand, but the impress of the 
baby foot on the Roman villa floor at Brading is a 
poem fertile in suggestion. So I copy the crumpled 
fragment as it lies before me : " When this you find, 
recall me to your mind. James Philip Hewlett, 
Subwarden's chorister, April 26, 1796." There 
follows the roll of boys ; then this edifying legend : 
" Yeates just gone out of chapel, making as if 
he was ill, to go to Botleigh with Miss Watson. 
Mr. Prickett reads prayers. Mr. Lardner is now 
reading the second lesson. Mr. Jenks read the 
first. Slatter shams a bad Eye because he did not 
know the English of the theme and could not do it. 



76 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

A whole holiday yesterday being St. Mark. Only 
the Subwarden of the Seniors at Prayers." This 
last is significant. So we take our leave of naughty 
Master James Philip Hewlett "/, curre, little gown 
boy," as dear Thacke- ay says. 

The first pioneer of musical feeling in Oxford 
was Jullien, an affected, grimacing, overdressed 
Frenchman, but a clever maestro, whose brilliant 
band played the dance and march music which set 
elderly heads and bonnets wagging in imperfect 
time, and who brought out excellent soloists. He 
often came amongst us, and the men who heard 
Koenig and Richardson at his concerts themselves 
took up the cornet and the flute. Oppressive 
practising d la Dick Swiveller prevailed ; but the 
taste for music spread. It was found that Thai- 
berg and Madame Dulcken would fill the Star 
Assembly Room ; that scientific and high-priced 
Chamber Quartetts, by Blagrove, Clementi, and the 
Reinagles, brought to Wyatt's room fit audience 
though few. In 1844 came Hullah ; large classes 
working under him in Merton College Hall ; mature 
and unmusical M.A.'s hammering away without 
much result at the " From his low and grassy bed," 
which formed the Pons Asinorum of the Hullah 
Manual. The practising soon died out ; but the 
real musicians took the hint. An Amateur Society 
was formed, with W. E. Jelf of Christchurch for its 
president, Lord Seaham, afterwards Lord London- 
derry, as secretary, a committee highly selected 
and unprofessional : and, with the help of Grim- 
met's band, concerts were given twice a term ; at 
which men since famous made their debut. Murray, 



CALLIOPE IN THE THIRTIES 77 

of Queen's, was there, who sang subsequently with 
Louisa Pyne on the Opera stage at Boulogne ; 
Thomson, afterwards Archbishop of York, sounded 
his magnificent baritone, publicly heard before only 
in the Boar's Head anthem upon Christmas Day ; 
young Frederick Ouseley improvised at the piano ; 
later on came the late Sir Herbert Oakeley, a slim 
boyish figure, with a passion for Handel. Musical 
talent was everywhere lying loose ; it needed some 
one to combine it, and the someone was Dr. Corfe, 
who succeeded Marshall at the Christchurch organ. 
He formed classes of amateurs for practice of 
classical music, training them laboriously in his 
picturesque old house Beam Hall, in Merton Lane ; 
until in 1847 they gave a public performance of 
"Acis and Galatea," Corfe rolling his rs, Staudigl- 
wise, in lt O ruddier than the cherry/' Mrs. Corfe 
singing the exquisite Galatea solos. This was 
followed by "The Antigone," by " Alexander's 
Feast," and, more daring still, by Beethoven's Mass 
in C. At the opening of the new Magdalen School 
on May Day, 1851, an amateur choir, conducted by 
Blyth, who had followed old Vickery at Magdalen, 
performed, without instruments, a series of sacred 
pieces. We sang, I remember, the Ave Verum, 
lately brought to England by the Berlin choir; 
Croft's "We will rejoice"; "Teach me, O Lord," 
and many more. Our great feat was a Cantata of 
Bach's, which occupied twenty-one minutes, Blyth 
informing us with pride at its close that we had 
kept the pitch exactly. Amongst our performers 
was old G. V. Cox the Bedel, survival from a 
former age. He had been the first chorister whom 



y8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Dr. Routh appointed more than half a century 
before. Healthy development is apt to throw 
down morbid outgrowths, manifested here in a 
spurious but short-lived influx of the so-called 
" Gregorian " music, a reversion to the modes 
prevalent in Christian worship before the discovery 
of counterpoint. The freak was ecclesiological, 
not musical ; part of the general putting back of 
clock hands which characterised the Church move- 
ment of the time. It was adopted by some 
amongst the clergy as a royal road to music, 
traversable without knowledge and without train- 
ing ; was rejected as an indefensible anachronism 
by musicians, who noted the unsuitableness of the 
" tones " to English words, their inexpressive bald- 
ness unless sung in unison by eighty or a hundred 
voices, the intolerable impropriety of appending to 
them harmonies for English Church performance. 
Meanwhile Ouseley brought his vast learning to pul- 
verise the theory of their derivation from the Jewish 
Temple service, pointing out that the melodic 
intervals of Oriental music could have borne no 
resemblance to the Greek system of tones and 
semitones on which were founded the chants of the 
ancient Western Church. It is recorded that an 
old gentleman, whose time-honoured Sunday wor- 
ship had been garnished by a new Rector with 
" Gregorians," ventured to expostulate, but was 
told that they were of consecrated antiquity, being 
in fact the very tones to which David set the 
Psalms. He deferred to the Rector's erudition, and 
thanked him for explaining a passage in the Old 
Testament which he had never understood before 



CALLIOPE IN THE THIRTIES 79 

why it was, namely, that when David played the 
harp before King Saul, Saul threw a javelin at him. 
Whether, without its incipient musical awaken- 
ing, Oxford would have gone crazy over Jenny 
Lind in December, 1848, I cannot say. She came 
as Stanley's guest, having stayed with his father 
at the Palace when she sang at Norwich. The 
Bishop, a little black figure, hopping about the 
Cathedral aisles like Vincent Bourne's "Corni- 
cula," was known locally as the Crow ; a nick- 
name previously borne by his brother, Lord Stanley 
of Alderley, the husband of Maria Josepha Holroyd; 
and Jenny's visit produced the epigram : 

" Ornithologists ancient and modern attest 
That the Cuckoo-bird visits the Nightingale's nest, 
But not Stanley's own Alderley Bird-book can show 1 
That the Nightingale roosts in the nest of the Crow." 

She sang in the Theatre, which was crowded from 
area to roof ; here, as elsewhere, winning every 
heart. That the sight of the interior with its 
thousand black gowns should have impressed her 
to tears is perhaps a tradition difficult of accept- 
ance ; there were tears in the hearts if not in the 
eyes of many amongst her hearers. Great was the 
demand for her autograph ; most good-naturedly 
she acceded to it. One undergraduate, who rushed 
into poetry and sent her his effusion, still retains 
her answer the verse from Brady and Tate : 

" Happy are they and only they, 
Who from Thy judgments never stray, 
Who know what's right, nor only so, 
But also practise what they know," 

1 "A Familiar History of Birds," by the Rev. Edward Stanley, 
Rector of Alderley, Cheshire (afterwards Bishop of Norwich). 



8o REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

with " In remembrance of Jenny Lind," and the 
date. On the day after the concert she came, 
veiled and incognita, to New College Chapel : but 
the Subwarden, Stacpoole, near whose stall she 
sat, detected her. It happened that the Hall 
was lighted and its piano open for the Thursday 
glee club practice ; Stacpoole, after showing her 
the Chapel, cunningly brought her on to see the 
Hall, by this time filled with men, and uncere- 
moniously asked if she would sing. She looked 
surprised, but unaffectedly consented ; bade the 
lady with her accompany, and sang to us a 
cavatina from Der Freyschiitz. I remember her, 
poising herself like a fisherman about to throw 
a casting-net, before she flung out her wonderful 
trills. Many years afterwards I heard her again 
in Max Midler's drawing-room ; the old execution 
was there ; the nightingale warble, the timbre- 
argentin, was gone. She told us that A. P. Stanley, 
who had no ear and hated music, or at least was 
bored by it, usually left the room when she warbled. 
But hearing her one day sing " I know that my 
Redeemer liveth," he told her she had given him 
an idea of what people mean by music. Only 
once before, he said, the same feeling had come 
over him, when in front of the Palace at Vienna 
he had heard a tattoo performed by four hundred 
drummers ! So, Eothen Kinglake, we are told, 
also tone-deaf, astray by some mischance at a 
matinee musicale, and asked by the hostess what 
kind of music he preferred, answered " I certainly 
have a preference ; it is for the drum." One thinks 
too of M. Jourdain's passion for la trompette marine. 






CALLIOPE IN THE THIRTIES 81 

Not till 1855 was music validly recognised by the 
University ; that achievement was reserved for Sir 
Frederick Ouseley. Sir Henry Bishop died ; the 
appointment rested with the Proctors, and through 
one of them, Holland of New College, a good 
musician, it was conferred on Ouseley. The neces- 
sary reforms were two : that the degree should 
become a reality, and that the Professor should 
not only profess, but teach. Hitherto any one 
seeking the Mus.Doc. had merely to inscribe his 
name as a nominal member of some College, 
send in an orchestral thesis, which was invariably 
accepted, pay a band for its performance, and take 
rank as an Oxford Doctor. Ouseley instituted a 
public examination by three competent examiners 
in historical and critical knowledge of music, and 
in elementary classics and mathematics, demand- 
ing also from each candidate a lengthy written 
composition to be submitted to himself. The 
stringency of the test was shown by the fact that 
in its early application fifty per cent, of the candi- 
dates failed, not a few of the plucks being a judg- 
ment on " cribbed exercises," which his immense 
knowledge enabled him to expose. I remember 
how the Professor, kindest-hearted of men, suffered 
in inflicting rejections. He was beset by piteous, 
even tearful, appeals, or by fierce expostulations ; 
had sometimes to escape into a friend's house from 
imploring remonstrants who chivied him in the 
streets ; but he kept conscientiously to the line he 
had drawn, with the result that in a few years' time 
the Oxford Doctorate came to be estimated as it 
had never been before. His lectures, somewhat 

F 



82 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

obscure and cramped in style, owed popularity 
to the practical illustration of them on the organ 
or piano by his friend Mr. Parratt, and to the 
volunteer assistance of a well-coached vocal and 
instrumental band. So at last Queen Calliope 
came down from heaven and made a home in 
Oxford. I am told she abides there still ; that 
Ouseley's white and crimson mantle fell upon a 
worthy Elisha, whose advent to St. Paul's had 
been hailed by the innocent quatrain : 

" St. Paul's had a loss 
In Dr. T. Goss ; 
I'm sure it's a gainer 
In Dr. J. Stainer;" 

that by his promotion to the vacant Chair Oxford 
was a gainer in her turn ; that if Sir Frederick 
Ouseley made music respectable in the University, 
Sir John Stainer made it beloved. But this is 
more recent history; and the Neleian sovereign 
old, though his confidences to Patroclus were 
sometimes garrulous in their old-world reminis- 
cence, never bored that Homeric Man Friday by 
recapitulation of contemporary events. 

" Plague on't, quoth Time to Thomas Hearne, 
Whatever I forget, you learn." 



NOTE. A lady reading this chapter recognised her great- 
grandfather in the recording chorister, Master James Philip 
Hewlett. She tells me that he grew up to be Chaplain of 
New College and Curate of St. Ebbe's, dying young. His 
brother was the author of " Peter Priggins," mentioned on 
page 85. 



CHAPTER VII 

UNDERGRADUATES IN THE THIRTIES 

" The seedsman, Memory, 

Sowed my deep-furrowed thought with many a Name, 
Whose glory will not die" 

TENNYSON. 

An old Diary Oxford in the Thirties as depicted in Fiction Its 
more Essential Aspects Some Great Undergraduates And a 
Great Tutor "Tom" Acland His Achievements at Oxford 
His Torrential Eloquence The "Uniomachia" Tom Brancker 
Solomon Caesar Malan His Seventy Languages Stanley 
Matthew Arnold Clough Thorold Rogers A Kindly Action 
An Interchange of Amenities. 

MANY years ago, with a collector's instinct, I ex- 
humed for sixpence a ragged manuscript from the 
rubbish heap of a Barbican bookstall. It was the 
diary of an old Rugbeian, covering his residence 
at Oxford through 1830 and 1831. His name was 
Trevor Wheler, cadet of a Warwickshire family 
living in their ancient manor-house at a village 
called Leamington Hastings, and he came to Ox- 
ford by the Regulator coach, going on to London 
when the term was over on the box of the Royal 
Defiance. The Trevor Whelers of to-day have 
tried to identify the diarist. They think he was 
Henry Trevor Wheler, who went to India, returned 
and took Orders. His name, I think, spelled Wheeler, 
occurs near the bottom of the M.A. list in my 1836 

Oxford Calendar. I lent the manuscript to old 

83 



84 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Bloxam, the Rugby antiquary, who died without 
returning it. This Wheler seems to have been a 
quiet, orderly fellow : he kept morning chapel 
strictly, went always to St. Mary's, where on one 
occasion he heard Keble preach ; and usually read 
a sermon in his own rooms on Sunday night. He 
corresponds with several female Christian names, 
and has written Byron's stanzas on " Woman, 
lovely woman " in the first page of his journal, with 
the date June I4th attached, evidently Comme- 
moration Week. He gives frequent wine parties, 
among the guests being Roundell and William 
Palmer and Piers Claughton, and always carefully 
records the number of corks he drew. He break- 
fasts with Tommy Short of Trinity, of whom I 
shall speak anon. He goes to New College Chapel, 
and to the Tyrolese singers at the Music Room. 
He frequents the Union, where seven men are 
blackballed in one evening, where Acland senior 
(the late Sir Thomas), is elected treasurer and 
Gladstone secretary, and where debates are held 
on Jewish disabilities, and on the superiority of 
Byron to Shelley, Sunderland coming express from 
Cambridge, with Arthur Hallam and Monckton 
Milnes, to speak upon the latter theme. Sunder- 
land, we may remember, was the contemporary 
of Tennyson, who described him as "a very 
plausible, Parliament-like, self-satisfied speaker at 
the Union," and sketched him mercilessly in the 
poem called "A Character." His sad story is told 
in Sir Wemyss Reid's " Life of Lord Houghton " 
(vol. L, p. 76). Wheler "sits" in the Little-Go 
school, and hears a man construe spicea virga a 






IN THE THIRTIES 85 

" spicy virgin." He buys the new edition of the 
Waverley Novels, and, attending Wise's sale-room, 
has a lot of seventy books knocked down to him 
for .1, 2S. The composition is neither incisive, 
eventful, nor picturesque ; but it is interesting, not 
only as all diaries are interesting by lifting the 
curtain of a fellow-mortal's mental privacy, but 
as raising from the shades with contemporary 
vividness the Undergraduate Oxford of seventy- 
seven years ago. 

We may read of this Oxford in forgotten novels : 
its vulgar side in Hewlett's " Peter Priggins " ; its 
rollicking side in Dickinson's "Vincent Eden," 
published in Bentley's Miscellany, and abruptly 
ceasing through pressure on the editor, it was 
believed, from apprehensive University authorities. 
In " Loss and Gain " we have its obscurantist side, 
due to the author's teaching; the picked men of 
ability in its pages Sheffield, Reding, Carlton 
ranging over not high themes of philosophy, 
science, culture, but the nightmares of Tractarian 
theology and the characteristics of a true Church. 
Mere foils were men like those, setting off the 
nobler Oxford of their time ; and never in the 
history of the University has a decade opened 
and progressed amid a group so brilliant. In 1830 
we have Gladstone, Liddell, Charles Wordsworth, 
Hope, T. Acland, Manning, Church, Halford 
Vaughan, William Adams, Walter Hamilton, Lords 
Dalhousie, Elgin, Lincoln, Canning, to take names 
almost at random. Nor was this dawn of golden 
times confined to Oxford ; at Cambridge in the 
very same year gathered a not less rare group 



86 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

of conjurati fratres : Spedding, Thomson, Brook- 
field, Trench, Tennyson, Monckton Milnes, Charles 
Duller, Merivale, Arthur Hallam, Kinglake, Ster- 
ling. There is deep pathos in these sparkling 
catalogues. We see the band of friends, cheerful, 
united, sanguine, starting together on life's path. 
Pass sixty years, we check the list, to find a 
scattered remnant of survivors, telling sadly of 
havoc wrought in their train by the storms of 
life, themselves too often alienated at its close. 
But the record of their deeds survives. Outworn, 
disappointed, hostile, not one of them lived in 
vain. The severances of party and of creed are 
incidents of independent warfare ; but the soul 
that is fervent and heroic not only fights its own 
way to perfection, but makes ignoble sloth more 
odious, brings high aim within the readier grasp 
of the generation and the men who follow it. 

" And O, blithe breeze ! and O, great seas, 

Though ne'er, that earliest parting past, 
On your wide plain they join again, 

Together lead them home at last. 
One port, methought, alike they sought, 

One purpose hold where'er they fare 
O, bounding breeze ! O, rushing seas ! 

At last, at last, unite them there ! " 

First among the Oxford comrades of that time, 
juvenum publica cura, universal undergraduate 
theme, ranked Charles Wordsworth ; tutor to 
Gladstone and Manning, to Sir Francis Doyle and 
Walter Hamilton, Acland, Hope, Lords Lincoln 
and Canning ; the best scholar, cricketer, oar, 
skater, racquet player, dancer, pugilist, of his day. 





CHARLES WORDSWORTH 
From the Richmond Portrait 



IN THE THIRTIES 87 

His proficiency in this last branch of antique 
athletics was attested by a fight at Harrow between 
himself and Trench, which sent the future Arch- 
bishop to a London dentist, in order to have his 
teeth set to rights. "That man," whispered Lord 
Malmesbury to Lord Derby, when Wordsworth 
had shaken hands with the Chancellor on receiving 
his honorary degree, "that man might have been 
anything he pleased." His attainments and capa- 
cities were set off by an unusually tall and hand- 
some figure, 

Gratior et pulchro veniens in corpore virtus. 

His aunt, the Poet's wife, told me that of all 
the young men she had ever known he was the 
most charming in manner, mind, and person. He 
was beyond all his contemporaries an adept in 
Greek and Latin versification ; whatever of noble 
thought, of touching sentiment, of transient 
humour, gained access to his mind, came draped 
in one or other of the classic tongues. His grief 
at his wife's death found expression in a perfect 
Latin couplet, untranslated, untranslatable. 1 A 
junior boy whom he once found eating cake in 
" Meads " at Winchester, artlessly offered him a 
piece, which he accepted, sending to the boy next 
day a pile of cakes and cream from the confec- 
tioner, with the note, 



(Requiting guerdon, cake for cake, receive) ; 

and his very inscriptions in hotel books when on 
a tour were Greek Iambics. 2 His career as Master 

1 Appendix E. 2 Ibid. 



88 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

in College at Winchester justified the promise of 
his youth : he raised the scholarship as well as 
the morality of the boys. His Greek Grammar 
was accepted by every school in England except 
Eton, which, preferring to go wrong with Plato, 
clung to its old inferior manual ; and he imparted 
to Winchester a tone of unaffected, thoughtful 
piety which long outlived his rule. At Gladstone's 
entreaty High Churchmen saw in the reviving 
Episcopal Church of Scotland a happy hunting 
ground for English Tractarianism he undertook 
the Headship of Glenalmond College, becoming 
soon afterwards Bishop of St. Andrews. It was 
a sacrifice ; had he remained in England he was 
to have been Dean of Rochester. Through no 
fault of his own he failed as Warden ; as Bishop 
he did all that man could do, but the post was 
not worthy of his powers ; and the illustrious 
Oxford paragon ended, like his Swedish name- 
sake, amid the trivial surroundings of a petty 
fortress and a barren strand. Having been his 
pupil in early years, I reviewed his Autobiography 
in a London Weekly. He was pleased by my 
notice of him, sought my name, and we exchanged 
many letters lively with memories of the past. 
The last I received from him was a New Year 
Greeting, with closing invocation of multos felices 
annos, ultimum felicissimum. It was his own 
annus ultimus ; he died before the day came 
round again. 

One more confederate in this i'epa veorijs, this 
sacred band of youthful brothers, let me com- 
memorate. Double First Class, when Double 



IN THE THIRTIES 89 

Firsts meant much, Fellow of All Souls, heir to 
beautiful Killerton with its mighty trap rocks, 
forest scenery, wild ponies, and red deer, Mr. or 
" Tom " Acland, as every one called him, was 
heralded into public life by unusual expectations. 
He was in Parliament for a time, made no great 
mark, married, early lost his wife, threw himself 
heartbroken into agriculture, under the tuition of 
his friend and relative Philip Pusey. He came 
late to his inheritance, for the Aclands are a 
longaeval race, and old Sir Thomas lived to a great 
age. The contrast between them was amusing ; 
the father with manners regal in their measured 
graciousness and polish, the son jerky and dis- 
cursive in talk, movement, ideas. " Tom thinks 
so fast," said a near relation, " that none of us 
can keep up with him." During the Fifties it was 
my r lot to see a good deal of him in Oxford : he 
used to walk with me in the streets, recalling his 
early life, the Newmania and its influence on his 
mental growth, his association with the (< Young 
England " movement, whose last surviving repre- 
sentative was the late Duke of Rutland. Stopping 
opposite to St. Mary Magdalen Church one day, 
he told me how he and Jacobson had taken there 
F. D. Maurice, when an undergraduate, to be 
baptised. He was full at that time of the " Middle 
Class Examinations," which, with Canon Brereton, 
he had initiated in Devonshire, and which de- 
veloped ultimately into the Oxford Local Exa- 
minations. To him especially, to his experience 
of West Buckland School, his patience, wisdom, 
and enthusiasm, that great educational experiment 



90 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

was due. I remember, too, that we went together 
to Max Miiller's opening lecture on Comparative 
Mythology ; he was disturbed, fidgeted, bit his 
nails. " It frightens one," he said. I was reading 
the " Odyssey " with a pupil one day ; he came in, 
and I handed him a book ; he listened for ten 
minutes, then gave me back the volume, saying : 
u How quickly one forgets ! but for the Latin 
translation at the foot I could not have followed " ; 
going on to tell me how with Bunsen and Philip 
Pusey he used to read Homer daily through a 
winter in Rome, and imitating Bunsen's Conti- 
nental pronunciation of the sonorous lines. 

In 1865 I gave evidence on School Teaching of 
Science before the Schools Inquiry Commission, of 
which he was a member. He questioned me at 
great length as to examination methods, as to the 
machinery needful for extending the local examina- 
tion to the public schools, as to the desirableness of 
a Government Board of Higher Education, with 
a special Minister at its head. He became some- 
what iterative ; and the chairman, Lord Taunton, 
cut him short ; he rose with an impatient gesture 
and went to the fire, but said to me afterwards, 
" I kept my temper." We travelled down to 
Oxford together ; he was in high spirits, having 
just re-entered Parliament after twenty years of 
exile, and poured forth optimistic talk. My sceptical 
interjections grated on him once or twice ; he was 
uneasy, too, lest my science teaching should over- 
shadow the imaginative and reverential side of the 
boy-mind. " Don't be too materialistic," he shouted 
into my cab from the pavement, as I dropped him 









IN THE THIRTIES 91 

at his brother's house in Broad Street. Yet again 
I was to know him, in his home at Killerton. I 
had left Tatmton School : and finding that I was 
uncertain as to my next move, he made me his 
Chaplain, and put his house at Sprydoncote at my 
disposal for a time ; an act of kindness for which I 
shall ever think of him with gratitude. He was now 
Sir Thomas a far abler man than his father in all 
the higher requirements of a great country gentle- 
man's position, yet, somehow, never filling his 
father's place in local sentiment ; less outwardly 
imposing, less captivating, suasive, patriarchal. I 
saw him constantly ; he used to drop in and talk 
on the winter afternoons. He was not a man of 
reminiscences, nor did his speech linger on scholar- 
ship and books ; present problems, social chiefly and 
theological, seemed to fill his mind. He would 
question me repeatedly as to my own mental 
development, wishing to trace the process by which 
High Church rigidity in the green salad-days 
changed into independent rationalism later on. He 
was devoted to agriculture, of which I had some 
experience ; to allotments, to cottage building in its 
sanitary, profitable, moral aspects. My microscope, 
which stood constantly in employ, used to puzzle 
him he always went to see what new marvel I had 
got, with an ever-renewed protest against the cult 
of the infinitely little. 

He was not amcebaean in his talk ; it sped forth 
torrential, and you had to listen ; it fascinated for 
the first half-hour, then to the hearer followed loss 
of sequence, logical perplexity, swamped surrender, 
boredom, headache, desperation. I once compared 



92 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

notes with a kindred patient, who had the day be- 
fore dined with him tete-d-tete. He described the 
eloquence, so genial in its opening, endurable 
during dinner by manducative and bibulous 
supports, by degrees assuming nightmare pro- 
portions, tempered only with faith in inevitable 
bedtime. That arrived, the good- nights were 
spoken, the staircase reached ; and then, stimulated 
by a fresh cestrus, the host began again, and the 
evening closed with a long supplementary harangue 
in the hall by the light of the bedroom candlesticks. 
This habit made him in society the terror of 
raconteurs, demanding as they do attentive auditors 
with interlocution just enough to start successive 
topics and give fresh chances to their wit. I recall 
meeting at his table Mr. Massey, M.P. for Tiverton, 
one of the brilliant London talkers of the day, a 
member, with Kinglake, Count Stzrelecki, American 
Ticknor, and others, of the famous Athenaeum 
" corner." He led off at the opening of dinner 
with a delicious anecdote of the well-known Mrs. 
Thistlethwayte ; but his incidental mention of a 
certain other lady inspired Sir Thomas to interrupt 
with a genealogical disquisition : the aroma of the 
story exhaled, and the narrator looked depressed. 
He recovered himself, and another good story was 
begun ; but when a second time Sir Thomas cut in 
mat apropos, Mr. Massey collapsed, and we heard no 
more of him. And so in this and other ways it 
came to pass that with all his great attainments he 
was not a man with whom you ever felt at ease. 
That he would be polite and kind you knew ; knew, 
too, that until submerged by vocables, as Carlyle 






IN THE THIRTIES 93 

said of Coleridge, you would gain abiding know- 
ledge from his boundless stores ; yet everywhere 
in his talk and temperament lurked sharp points 
on which you feared to tread the conversational 
smoothness was suppositus cineri doloso. It used to 
be said that God made men, women, and Aclands, 
(it was said, I think, originally of the Herveys), and 
he lent full flavour to the epigram. He gave one 
always the idea of a superlatively good thing un- 
kindly impaired by Fate. To his birth thronged the 
fairy god-mother with gifts of intellect, fluency, 
loftiness of standard, philanthropy of aim, gene- 
rosity of nature ; then came the malignant Un- 
invited, with the marring supplement of position, 
fortune, ease, to annul the bracing, shaping discipline 
which moulds the self-made man. Covered with 
University distinctions, Fellow of All Souls, rich in 
Parliamentary promise, protagonist in a great social 
and religious movement all older men looked on 
at him expectantly with a Ce gar$on ira loin. But 
inherited wealth absolved him from compulsory 
struggle, rank and repute secured him unearned 
deference he was admirable, useful, honoured, 
loved ; but he disproved the augury of greatness, 
he failed to realise the promise heralded by his 
splendid youth. 

Faster than Homer's leaves the Undergraduate 
generations pass. Three years, or four at most, 
push them from their stools, and a fresh succession 
enters on the stage. In 1833 the " Uniomachia," 
Battle of the Union, embalms another scarcely 
less remarkable relay. 



94 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

I well knew Tom Brancker, who was believed 
to be dux factij originator of the social war. 
Coming from Shrewsbury in jacket and turn- 
down collars, he had, while still a schoolboy, 
though matriculated, beaten Gladstone and Scott 
for the Ireland. Butler had sent him up by Scott's 
advice, for the sake of practice merely, but he 
came out scholar, surpassing his two great com- 
petitors, as Vowler Short told them, in the points 
of taste and terseness. He failed afterwards to 
get his First, but became Fellow of Wadham, and 
dropped finally into the lotos-eating of a College 
incumbency. He was hated and dreaded as a bully 
in the Schools, but I always found him kind and 
friendly. It was usual, as matter of course and 
compliment, to re-elect each year the committee 
of the Union ; but just then was the time of the 
Reform Bill, the outgoing committee was Tory ; 
and Brancker, with Bob Lowe, Massie, and other 
zealous Whigs, successfully opposed them, and 
were elected in their place. The exiles formed an 
opposition club called the Rambler, so popular 
and successful that the new committee proposed 
to expel its members from the Union. In hope 
of lulling the storm, two St. Mary Hall men, 
Jackson and Sinclair, produced the " Uniomachia," 
a mock Homeric poem with a dog-Latin Inter- 
pretatio and notes, and, in a second edition, with 
an additional " Notularum Spicilegium " by Robert 
Scott, afterwards Master of Balliol. There followed 
an English translation from the pen of Archdeacon 
Giles, and an "Emollient and Sedative Draught" 
by Lenient Lullaby, F.R.S., whom I have never 



IN THE THIRTIES 95 

been able to identify. The characters, besides 
the three innovators, were Cardwell, W. G. Ward, 
Roundell Palmer, Mayow, Tait, Pattison, and 
Charles Marriott. The fun fell upon the combatants 
like Virgil's pulveris exigui jactus on the bees, and 
the hatchet was buried in a reconciliation dinner 
at the Star. Of Marriott I shall speak later on, 
as also of Mark Pattison, who in these years, not 
yet disappointed, melancholy, and vindictive, was 
struggling with undigested reading, half-awakened 
intelligence, morbid self-consciousness, progressing 
towards that love of learning for learning's sake 
which, agnostic, cynic, pessimist as he was, gave 
unity to his sad, remonstrant life. 

Contemporary with these was a genius perhaps 
more remarkable, certainly more unusual, than 
any of them. In 1833 Solomon Caesar Malan 
matriculated at St. Edmund's Hall, a young man 
with a young wife, son to a Swiss Pastor, speaking 
as yet broken English, but fluent Latin, Romaic, 
French, Spanish, Italian, German ; and a proficient 
at twenty-two years old in Hebrew, Arabic, San- 
skrit. He won the Boden and the Kennicott 
Scholarships, took a Second Class, missing his 
First through the imperfection of his English, was 
ordained, became Professor in Calcutta, gathered 
up Chinese, Japanese, the various Indian, Malay, 
Persian tongues, came home to the valuable living 
of Broadwinsor, where he lived, when not travelling, 
through forty years, amassing a library in more 
than seventy languages, the majority of which he 
spoke with freedom, read familiarly, wrote with 
a clearness and beauty rivalling the best native 



96 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

caligraphy. In his frequent Eastern rambles he 
was able, say his fellow-travellers, to chat in 
market and bazaar with every one whom he met. 
On a visit to the Bishop of Innereth he preached a 
Georgian sermon in the Cathedral. He published 
twenty - six translations of English theological 
works, in Chinese and Japanese, Arabic and 
Syriac, Armenian, Russian, Ethiopic, Coptic. 
Five-fold outnumbering the fecundity of his royal 
namesake, he left behind him a collection of 
16,000 Proverbs, taken from original Oriental texts, 
each written in its native character and translated. 
So unique was the variety of his Pentecostal attain- 
ments that experts could not be found even to 
catalogue the four thousand books which he pre- 
sented, multa gemens, with pathetic lamentation 
over their surrender, to the Indian Institute at 
Oxford. 

I encountered him at three periods of his life. 
First as a young man at the evening parties of 
John Hill, Vice-Principal of St. Edmund's Hall, 
where prevailed tea and coffee, pietistic Low 
Church talk, prayer and hymnody of portentous 
length, yet palliated by the chance of sharing Bible 
or hymn-book with one of the host's four charming 
daughters. Twenty years later I recall him as a 
guest in Oxford Common Rooms, laying down the 
law on questions of Scriptural interpretation, his 
abysmal fund of learning and his dogmatic insist- 
ency floated by the rollicking fun of his illustrations 
and their delightful touches of travelled personal 
experience. Finally, in his old age I spent a long 
summer day with him in the Broadwinsor home, 




IN THE THIRTIES 97 

enjoying his library, aviary, workshop, drawings ; 
his hospitality stimulated by the discovery that in 
some of his favourite pursuits I was, longo intervallo, 
an enthusiast like himself. He was a benevolently 
autocratic vicar, controlling his parish with patri- 
archally imperious rule, original, racy, trenchant, 
in Sunday School and sermons. It was his wont 
to take into the pulpit his college cap : into it he 
had pasted words of Scripture which he always 
read to himself before preaching. They were 
taken from the story of Balaam : " And the Lord 

opened the mouth of the ass, and she said " 

He died at eighty-two, to have been admitted, let 
us hope, in the unknown land to comradeship of 
no ordinary brotherhood by spirits of every nation, 
kindred, tongue ; to have found there, ranged upon 
celestial shelves, the Platonic archetypes of the 
priceless books which it tore his mortal heart to 
leave. 

Skip two or three more years, and we come to a 
scarcely less interesting student stratum, to the 
period of Stanley, Matthew Arnold, Clough. Think 
of them walking among the Cumnor cowslips and 
the fritillaries of the Eynsham river side, bathing in 
the abandoned lasher, noting from Hinksey Hill on 
winter afternoons the far-off light of the windows 
in Christchurch Hall, mounting to the Glanvil elm, 
which yet stands out clear against the flaming sun- 
set sky. Imagine the talk, now glad, now pensive, 
of their still illusioned youth ; its poetry, specu- 
lation, criticism, Wordsworthian insight into nature, 
valiant optimism, rare communion of highest and 

G 



98 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

most sacred thoughts; as one reads "Thyrsis" 
and "The Scholar Gypsy," airs from Paradise seem 
to breathe around one, airs which only Oxford 
could have inspired, only high natures such as 
theirs could have exhaled. I heard Stanley recite 
his " Gypsies" in the Theatre in 1837 > * ne scene 
comes back to me as of yesterday the crowded 
area, the ladies in their enormous bonnets ; hand- 
some, stately Dr. Gilbert in the Vice-Chancellor's 
chair ; the pale, slight, weak-voiced, boyish figure 
in the rostrum ; the roar of cheers which greeted 
him. Clough, too, I knew ; read with him for half 
a year in his tiny Holywell lodging immediately 
after his election to Oriel, working the first hour in 
the morning, while he ate his frugal breakfast of 
dry bread and chocolate. It was his happy time, 
before his piping took a troubled sound ; his six 
golden Oxford graduate years of plain living and 
high thinking, of hopeful fight for freedom, of the 
rapturous Long Vacations in Wales, the Highlands, 
the English Lakes, summed up immortally in his 
"Bothie." The original edition in its blue cloth 
lies before me as I write, a present from his son. I 
have noted in it the undergraduates represented, so 
far as they are now recoverable. 1 Side by side 
with these men were Donkin, Lord Hobhouse, 
Brodie, Henry Acland, young gentleman-commoner 
Ruskin ; little, white-haired, cherub-faced Jowett ; 
James Riddell, whose <0*W>, fydivay, <j)i\ta-Trj, Moberly 
used to quote as the unsurpassable gem of all the 
Anthologies ; and, perhaps a year or two earlier, 
"Jem " Lonsdale, great in estimation rather that in 
1 Appendix F, 



IN THE THIRTIES 99 

production as a scholar, the tales of his wit and 
genius ephemeral and for the most part lost. Let 
me give one specimen. Asked to preach at Eton 
by his old tutor, Bishop Chapman, he sent this 
answer : 

" Cur imparem me cingis honoribus, 
Me, triste lignum, me vetulum, pigro 
Sermone, fundentemque tardo 
Ore soporiferum papaver ? " 

Henry Furneaux, who was his colleague in the 
Moderation Schools, used to speak of him as the 
most winning of men from his extreme simplicity 
and absence of all self-consciousness ; his scholar- 
ship not so much an acquirement as an intuition, 
inherited probably from his father. It was amongst 
the answers to a Paper set by him that occurred the 
delicious explanation of the Lupercalia, " Lupercalia 
is the name of a she-wolf that suckled Romeo and 
Juliet." Riddell's quiet manner concealed a turn 
for comedy. I once saw him in a charade act with 
much humour the Parliamentary Candidate in the 
gentlemanly interest, opposing Henry Wall, who 
was the demagogue. And one day at Zermatt, the 
party being bored by a cockney who was destitute 
of Miss Catherine Fanshawe's letter, and was afraid 
of losing his 'at on the mountain, Riddell wrote in 
the hotel book : 

" A gent who was late at Zermatt, 
Dropped an H on the Hoch Taligat ; 
If he'll fetch it away 
He'll find it some day 
Of use in the front of his 'at." 

He was thus embalmed by a contemporary poet. 



ioo REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

" The other, of an ancient name, erst dear 

To Border hills, though thence too long exiled ; 

In lore of Hellas scholar without peer, 

Reared in grey halls on banks of Severn piled. 

Reserved he was, of few words and slow speech ; 
Yet dwelt strange power that beyond words could reach 
In that sweet face by no rude thought defiled." 

The Forties were years of strife ; of Ward's ex- 
pulsion, Newman's perversion, Hampden's chal- 
lenged bishopric ; a time none the less of great 
youthful names. Thorold Rogers I knew slightly 
as an undergraduate. He was then a loud, domi- 
nating, rapid talker, deluging his company with a 
shower-bath of Greek choruses, not more regardful 
of the skins into which he poured the wine of his 
erudition than was Tom Jones when in company 
with Ensigns Northerton and Adderley. He so 
frightened men, in fact, that he could find no 
College to take him as a Fellow. Altered and 
saddened by his young wife's death, he plunged 
into politics as a relief, obtained the Act of Parlia- 
ment which enabled him to resign his Orders, and 
sat in the House of Commons till not long before 
his death, valued there as a walking dictionary, 
and always the centre of a laughing group in the 
smoking-room or on the Terrace. From this time 
I knew him closely; we stood together on many 
political platforms, and I pleased him by an appre- 
ciative review in The Spectator of his book on 
Holland, which had been coarsely attacked, as I 
thought, in The Pall Mall. He was an unequalled 
story-teller ; some men affect nonchalance in re- 
peating a good thing, but Rogers's face used to 
flash and his eyes start out with contagious joy in a 






IN THE THIRTIES 



101 



clever saying. That football is the accomplishment 
of a hippopotamus, that the Athanasian Creed was 
an election squib a saying Rogeresque but justi- 
fied, as readers of Foulkes's investigation are 
aware and his happy comparison of a serious, 
hairy-faced Birmingham M.P. to a costive terrier, 
are amongst his countless epigrams which occur to 
me. His was the pun which disqualified Mundella 
of the big nose, 6 peyaXoppwos, as Chairman of 
Committees, because "when Mr. Mundella was in 
the Chair the Noes would always have it." Some 
prolix creature had told one day in the House 
the ancient story of a miser swallowing a guinea, 
from whose niggard interior an emetic persuaded 
him to refund only ten and sixpence. Rogers 
seized a pencil, scribbled and handed round the 
following : 

X# VO/UK&S SK J diroKpiJ^uv Kar^^po^dic 

KCU /3w$ts Odvarov IIpo/cXcs e'Seicre fiopov. 
vvv & /xoyis T *X v i? napaKeAaov BrjOcv iarpov 



rdv Se rpiutv ptpiStov y\L<T\p(i)<s ctTrevoax^icrc 8iir\fjv 
dvOpwTTov yacTTrjp, TTJV 8e /career x' IBiav. 

Translated in the manner of Swift : 



" Attorney Proclus, so they say, 

Swallowed ten drachmas 'tother day. 
He choked, he gasped ; to ease his ill 

Came Paracelse with purge and pill. 
Seven coins the emetic spew obeyed 

Cries Proclus, ' Curse your plundering trade ! 
Of my loved store three-fourths are gone ; 

So help you Plutus, leave me one !'" 



102 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

When news came down to the Lobby of Lord 
Derby's death, he wrote : 

" Reckless in speech, and truculent in face, 

Geoffrey, the fourteenth Earl of Derby, died : 
Only in this superior to his race, 

He left the winning for the losing side." 

He used to quote, as the cleverest retort ever made, 
the answer of a notorious admiral to the Duke of 
Clarence : " I hear, sir, that you are the biggest 
blackguard in Portsmouth ! " " I hope your Royal 
Highness has riot come down to take away my 
character ! " I met him one day laughing along 
Beaumont Street ; he had just overheard a scout 
talking to a waiter at the door of the Randolph : 
" So he says to me, his lordship says, 'You don't 
seem to think much of them bishops.' 'No, my 
lord, I don't,' says I ; ' I remember them all coming 
up here with pockmantles not worth five shillings, 
and now they're as fat as Moses's kine.' " Beneath 
his coarseness and profanity lay not only political 
morality and ardent patriotism but active kindness 
of heart. A clever girl at Somerville had exhausted 
her funds after two years' residence and was about 
to leave. Rogers heard of it, told the circum- 
stances about the House in his forcible way till he 
had collected ^80, which he sent to the young 
lady, who is now a successful and distinguished 
professor. Of his bons mots the majority, perhaps, 
will not bear repetition ; there was truth as well as 
pungency in the saying which explained his writing 
a book on Holland by the fact that it is "a low 
country full of dams." When Freeman came up 
to examine in the newly-founded History school, 



IN THE THIRTIES 



103 



he and Rogers, an equally ursine pair, were mali- 
ciously brought together at a dinner party. In 
compliment to Rogers the host led the talk to 
political economy. " Political economy," said 
Freeman, " seems to me to be so much garbage." 
" Garbage is it ? " said Rogers ; " the very thing 
then for a hog like you." Readers of Walter 
Scott's note in Boswell (vol. v. p. 114) will recall 
the meeting between Adam Smith and Dr. Johnson. 



CHAPTER VIII 
MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 

" Prceteritos extollens, Recentiorum incuriosus" 

CICERO. 

Goldwin SmithJohn Conington Hayman and Rugby and More- 
decay Frank Buckland J. G. Wood His Many-sidedness 
The "Common Object" Blaydes of Oxford and Calverley of 
Cambridge R. E. Bartlett The Schoolboy and the Queen 
Walter Wren The Great Henley Race of 1843 : "Sept em contra 
Camum "George Cox " Black Gowns and Red Coats "The 
Early Fifties Harry Wilkins Herbert Coleridge His Mother, 
Sara Coleridge Dress at Oxford Fifty Years Ago and Now 
Unathletic Oxford The Supremacy of the Spirit. 

GOLDWIN SMITH "vastiest Goldwin/' Rolleston 
always called him towered above his fellows as 
undergraduate and bachelor. We all saw in him 
the coming man ; but he married, settled in 
America, and never came. Close to him was John 
Conington, whose extraordinary visage, with its 
green-cheese hue, gleaming spectacles, quivering 
protrusive lips, might be encountered every day 
at 2 o'clock on his way to a constitutional, which 
he would have liked, he said, to conduct between 
two high walls, shutting out all irrelevant topics 
such as surroundings and scenery might suggest. 
He ranked in Oxford as a scholar of the very highest 
character and industry, attested by his fine trans- 
lations of Horace and of Virgil. He was a lonely, 







MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 105 

melancholy man, out of harmony with the young 
athletes who were his pupils ; prevented from 
voluntary advances to them by his own insuperable 
shyness ; but eagerly making friends with any who 
would seek his confidence, and sparing no pains 
with promising students. He was passionately 
fond of the best English poets, by whom he illus- 
trated his classical teaching. His pupils learned 
from him what University teaching should have 
been, learned too how its realisation was made 
impossible by the imperfection of previous public 
school training. From an esprit and a Liberal he 
suddenly became Conservative and Puseyite ; died 
early, leaving a profuse diary of his Oxford life, 
which his executors unfortunately thought it their 
duty to destroy. In the same class list with 
Goldwin Smith and Freeman, a Second where 
they were Firsts, stood the name of Hayman, the 
unfortunate ad interim Headmaster of Rugby. I 
first met him in our younger days on the top of 
a Devonshire coach. I was quoting Pope's 
" Character of Narcissa," and hesitated for a 
word, which a voice behind me supplied, and its 
owner joined in our talk with spirit. He was a 
pleasant fellow and a good scholar, though what 
the waiter in the " Newcomes " would call a 
11 harbitrary gent " ; but his election to Rugby 
was unfortunate for everybody. Only a Hercules 
could have succeeded an Atlas such as Temple ; 
and Hayman's inferiority in generalship, teaching, 
preaching, capacity for work, at once armed 
against him boys and masters. His forlorn posi- 
tion won him public sympathy, but the numbers 



106 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

fell ; it became clear even to the Philistines who 
had appointed him that he must go : 

" When Rugby, spite of priest or layman, 

Began to fall away, 
The Governors suspended Hayman 
For fear of More-decay." 

The next year brings us to Frank Buckland. 
Few men can now recall those unique breakfasts 
at Frank's rooms in the corner of Fell's Buildings ; 
the host, in blue pea-jacket and German student's 
cap, blowing blasts out of a tremendous wooden 
horn ; the various pets who made it difficult to 
speak or move ; the marmots, and the dove, and 
the monkey, and the chameleon, and the snakes, 
and the guinea-pigs ; the after-breakfast visits to 
the eagle, or the jackal, or the pariah dog, or 
Tiglath-pileser the bear, in the little yard outside, 
" Why Tiglath-pileser ? " several inquiring corre- 
spondents asked me ; " why give unexplained these 
cryptic names and jokes of long ago ? " Thus 
it was. On a certain morning in May the bear 
escaped from Buckland's yard, and found his way 
into the chapel, at the moment when a student was 
reading the first Lesson, 2 Kings xvi., and had 
reached the point at which King Ahaz was on his 
way to meet Tiglath-pileser, King of Assyria, at 
Damascus. So far as that congregation was con- 
cerned, the meeting never came off ; the bear made 
straight for the Lectern, its occupant fled to his 
place, and the half-uttered name on his lips was 
transferred to the intruder. Gaisford sent for 
Frank : " You or that animal, Mr. Buckland, must 
quit the College." The undergraduate was father 






MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 107 

of the man. His house in Albany Street became 
one of the sights of London ; but to enter it pre- 
supposed iron nerves and dura ilia. Introduced 
to some five-and-twenty poor relations, free from 
shyness, deeply interested in your dress and person, 
you felt as if another flood were toward, and the 
animals parading for admission to the Ark. You 
remained to dine : but, as in his father's house 
so in his own, the genius of experiment, supreme 
in all departments, was nowhere so active as at the 
dinner table. Panther chops, rhinoceros pie, bison 
steaks, kangaroo ham, horse's tongue, elephant's 
trunk, are recorded among his manifestations of 
hospitality ; his brother-in-law quotes from the 
diary of a departing guest " Tripe for dinner; 
don't like crocodile for breakfast." 

Of the same standing acquaintances I think 
they were not was ]. G. Wood, the well-known 
lecturing naturalist. He was a Bible clerk of 
Merton, of the class typified in Tom Brown's 
" Hardy," one of two pariahs compelled by chill 
penury to accept the coarse munificence of the 
College, who pricked Chapel attendance and said 
grace, knowing no one, living alone, dining in Hall 
alone on the remnants sent from the high table. I 
used to go with him down the river in the Long 
Vacation, with gun, fishing rod, collecting net. He 
was a redoubtable athlete, champion of the St. Cle- 
ment's gymnasium ; for Maclaren's rooms were not 
then built, though he had come lately to Oxford, 
succeeding little Angelo, who taught fencing to the 
previous generation. Wood was skilled and im- 
perturbable at singlestick, and a first-rate boxer. I 



io8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

saw him once put on the gloves with Maclaren 
at Parson's Pleasure when both were stripped 
for a bathe, hitting Mac in the face during the 
first round, and receiving the good-natured pro- 
fessional's warm congratulations. Large - boned 
and muscular, he had a small, facile, lady -like 
hand ; was a dexterous anatomist ; many of his dis- 
sections being still in the Museum ; mounted skil- 
fully for the microscope, manufactured for himself 
electrical and optical apparatus, took calotypes, as 
photographs were called before the collodion pro- 
cess was invented, drew spirited caricatures. He 
was not then, if ever, a scientific naturalist ; he 
picked up knowledge as he went on, and cleverly 
made the most of it ; and his authorship was due 
to accident. He was intimate with Buckley, a 
Christchurch chaplain, who did cribs for Rout- 
ledge ; the publisher asked him to recommend a 
man who could produce for moderate payment a 
popular work on Natural History, and Buckley 
named Wood. He accepted, and came to me 
for suggestions, which I gave rather inventively. 
The bull terrier "Crab" who figures in his first 
book was mine ; some of that quadruped's recorded 
feats, with other surprising incidents, one in par- 
ticular of a pointer standing at a pig, were, I fear, 
not founded on fact. But the little book had a 
great sale, was followed by "Common Objects of 
the Country," and led to a long series of more 
pretentious works. Wood was ordained to the 
curacy of St. Thomas, then, under " Tom " Cham- 
berlain, of Christchurch, the most ritualistic of 
Oxford temples ; in doubt to the last moment 



: 



MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 109 

whether he was to serve under Chamberlain or 
under a Low Church friend of Ben Symons, he bid 
the tailor leave his clerical waistcoat uncompleted, 
that it might be open or M.B. according to his 
rector's tenets. He made no mark as a clergyman, 
his vocation lay in writing and in lecturing. Plain 
in features and rough in dress men called him the 
" Common Object" and with a somewhat indis- 
tinct voice, he was yet on the platform extraor- 
dinarily popular, fascinating, by his anecdotic itch, 
as Peter Pindar calls it, and his skill in blackboard 
drawing, not certainly scientific or highly cultivated 
hearers, but the half-educated intelligence of a 
middle-class or schoolboy audience. He died sud- 
denly while at work, struck down on a lecturing 
tour. 

1 pass to a very different man, who came up to 
Oxford as Blaydes in 1847, and left it in 1849 to 
be better known as Calverley at Cambridge : his 
encounters with the little " Master," the stone 
thrown up at his library window, the " Well, 
yellow-belly, how's Jinks ? " the surmise at Col- 
lections that it might perhaps be some time since 
the Master had read Longinus, were long current 
in Balliol. When one of his escapades made it 
probable that the authorities would invite him 
to adorn with his liveliness the groves of some 
other Academe, R. E. Bartlett, afterwards Fellow 
of Trinity, wrote : 

" Oh, freshman, redolent of weed, 
Oh, scholar, running fast to seed, 
This maxim in thy meerschaum put 
The sharpest Blades will soonest cut." 



no REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 
He answered: 

" Your verse is tolerable ; but 
My case you understand ill ; 
For though the Dons want Blades to cut, 
They cannot find a handle." 

Bartlett's, too, were the lines on Weatherby, a fast 
scholar of Balliol, who was sent down for being 
drunk in Quad, and prostrating the porter who 
tried to get him to bed : 

" Why was his term, at first so short, 

Cut prematurely shorter ? 
The reason was, he floored the Port, 
And then he floored the Porter." 

The catastrophe occurred in the lt short" three- 
week summer term, which gives point to the 
opening line. Conversing with an old Harrovian 
the other day, I asked what sort of reputation 
Blaydes left behind him at the school. Not, it 
appeared, for wit and verse-writing, but as the only 
boy who ever jumped from the top to the bottom 
of the old school steps. So Matthew Arnold's leap 
over the Wadham railings used to be familiar to 
many who had never read his books ; so a clever boy 
named Selwyn earned immortality at Winchester by 
jumping for a bet over " Nevy's hedge " into the 
road far below. He broke his leg, had been 
thought sure of the Queen's gold medal for that 
year, locked from ink and paper lost his chance. 
The young Queen heard the story through his 
cousin, a maid of honour, and sent him a gold 
watch, with an inscription more precious than 
Wyon's shop full of medals. 

By the way, what becomes of old school and 



MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES in 

college medals ? One rarely meets with them in 
after life. A greatly beloved London preacher sold 
all his the other day that he might subsidise a 
deserving institution ; and Macaulay did the same 
through want of money for himself in early 
struggling days. My own, gold and silver, repose 
under a glass case, and perhaps those who survive 
me may value them. 

Calverley retained his saltatory power at Cam- 
bridge. Professor Allbutt kindly writes to me 
that one evening, in the presence of himself, 
Walter Besant, and Wormald, then stroke of the 
Christ's boat, he suddenly sprang like a skipjack 
off the floor of the Christ's gatehouse porch, over 
the bar which crossed (and still crosses) from 
the wall to fasten one valve of the gate, alighting 
safely in the triangular space within. The marvel 
was not so much the height (37-^- inches) as the 
rise without a run and clean descent into the 
narrow triangular enclosure, free from collision 
with door or wall : he must have jumped straight 
upwards, clearing his feet easily, and then drop- 
ping vertically downwards. He possessed enor- 
mous thighs and large gluteal muscles, enabling 
him to spring like a grass-hopper. The Professor 
adds that Calverley was the most indolent man 
of parts he ever knew; his reading casual and 
intermittent, but his memory prodigious, with 
power of absorbing from a book as though by 
some ethereal process the matter demanded and 
assimilable by his genius. His Cambridge life 
has lately lost an honest chronicler in his great 
friend Walter Wren, who boasted that he had 



ii2 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

answered all the questions in the Calverley Pick- 
wick Paper except the "red-faced Nixon." 

More than once I have sat with Wren into the 
small hours, listening to his reminiscences of his 
friend's lampoons, epigrams, miracles of scholar- 
ship and wit. Wren had often pressed him for a 
scholarly tour de force ; caught him one wet morn- 
ing in his room, and seized his chance. The 
"Excursion" lay on a table; Calverley handed 
it to his friend " Read me any five-and-twenty 
lines." Wren did so. "Again, more slowly." 
Then for ten or fifteen minutes Calverley sat with 
his head in his hands. " Now write " ; and he 
dictated the translation in fluent Virgilian hexa- 
meters. The remaining story I cite with special 
pleasure as revealing a very noble aspect of his 
many-faceted character. He heard from a pro- 
fligate acquaintance of a country girl, turned out 
of home by her parents for disobedience in some 
love affair, come to seek service at Cambridge, 
not yet ruined, but in a house where ruin was in- 
evitable and imminent. He was reading for the 
Craven, which he won ; to be seen by tutor or 
proctor in questionable company or at a house 
of ill-repute would mean rustication or expulsion ; 
but he went to the place at once, extricated the 
girl, took her with him to the station, paid her 
fare, and sent her home with an earnestly written 
letter to her father which brought about a recon- 
ciliation, and saved her. Clever as Blaydes in 
epigram and pun, though not in sustained satire, 
was Arthur Ridding, of New College, elder brother 
to the late Bishop of Southwell. When every one 



MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 113 

was celebrating in Latin verse the Duke of Well- 
ington's funeral he was asked how to render 
" lying in state." "Splendide mendax," was the 
answer. At Winchester once during a cricket 
match we passed on the "Tunbridge" towpath 
a miserable horse, who with drooping head, glassy 
eyes, protruding bones, was dragging a heavy 
barge. "Tb-7rd0-o<s" (Tow-path- oss) was Ridding's 
comment. 

I must not leave the Forties without a re- 
miniscence of the Henley race, the " Septem contra 
Camum," in 1843. It was the event which really 
popularised boating at Oxford ; the College races 
were before that year a mere pleasant incident in a 
summer term ; there were no College barges on 
the river ; even the Oxford and Cambridge race, 
except in 1829, the first race rowed, excited 
languid interest. I stopped on Battersea bridge 
one day in 1841 to watch the Oxford boat practising 
against a Thames crew ; there was hardly any one 
on the bank, where to-day thousands would be 
running. It was, I think, in 1842 that a new oar, 
Fletcher Menzies, of University, arose, under 
whose training the Oxford style was changed and 
pace improved, with prospect of beating Cam- 
bridge, which had for several years been victor; 
and the '43 race at Henley between the two picked 
crews of Oxford University and the Cambridge 
Subscription Rooms was anxiously expected as 
a test. A few hours before the race Menzies, the 
stroke, fell ill, and the " Rooms " refused to allow a 
substitute. The contest seemed at an end, when 
some one Royds, of Brasenose, it was said 

H 



1 1 4 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

proposed that the Oxford seven should pull against 
the Cambridge eight. The audacious gallantry of 
the idea took hold; George Hughes, of Oriel, 
brother to Tom Hughes, was moved from seven to 
stroke, and his place taken by the bow, Lowndes, of 
Christchurch. 1 So, with the bow-oar unmanned, 
the race began, the crew hopeless of more than 
a creditable defeat ; but as their boat held its own, 
drew up, passed ahead, the excitement became 
tremendous ; and when the Oxford flag fluttered 
up, the men on the bank, as the guard said of his 
leaders in " Nicholas Nickleby," went mad with 
glory ; carried the rowers to the Red Lion, wildly 
raced the street, like horses on the Corso in a 
Roman carnival, tore up a heavy toll-bar gate, and 
flung it over the bridge into the river. The boat 
was moored as a trophy in Christchurch meadow at 
the point where Pactolus poured its foul stream 
into the Isis, and was shown for twenty-four years 
to admiring freshmen ; until in 1867, rotten and de- 
cayed, it was bought by jolly Tom Randall, mercer, 
alderman, scholar, its sound parts fashioned into a 
chair, and presented as the President's throne to 
the University barge. One of the seven, John Cox, 
of Trinity, who pulled six, died quite recently. 

His elder brother, George Cox, of New College, 
an extraordinarily promising man, died young. Be- 
sides one or two coarse, clever, very popular songs, 

1 I give the names of the seven in Appendix C. I be- 
lieve that two of them, Royds and Bourne, are still alive. 
R. B. Mansfield, author of the "Log of the Water-lily," a 
brother Wykehamist, wrote to me that he was appointed locum 
tenens for Royds, who was unable to come up till just before 
the race. 



MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 115 

such as the " Oxford Freshman/' and " A Drop of 
Good Beer/' he left behind him a satire of unusual 
power, called " Black Gowns and Red Coats," pub- 
lished in 1834. It is now very scarce, its author so 
forgotten that Mr. Hirst in the Cassell " Life of 
Gladstone," quotes him as George Fox. He draws 
a lurid picture ; proclaims the teaching barren, the 
teachers sunk in crapulence and sloth, the taught 
licentious, extravagant, idle. Of t the Dons only 
three are excepted from his lash, the two Duncans 
and Macbride ; of recent undergraduates only 
one : 

" Yet on one form, whose ear can ne'er refuse 
The Muse's tribute, for he loved the Muse, 
Full many a fond expectant eye is bent, 
Where Newark's towers are mirrored in the Trent. 
Perchance ere long to shine in senates first, 
His manhood echoing what his youth rehearsed, 
Soon Gladstone's brows will bloom with greener bays, 
Than twine the chaplet of a minstrel's lays, 
Nor heed, while poring o'er each graver line, 
The far faint music of a lute like mine." 

There are passages of terrible force, as in the por- 
trait of the profligate freshman ; memorable photo- 
graphs of contemporary follies, as in the fast 
exquisite's career ; echoes of conservative alarm at 
the muttering thunder of reform ; momentary lapses 
into prize poem jingle, redeemed by abundant 
resonant epigram ; one special episode, " A Simple 
Tale of Seduction," rising very nearly to the highest 
strain of poetry. Was it a faithful portrait? No 
more than was the " Oxford Spy," whose author, 
Shergold Boone, lived to express his deep regret for 
having written it in a curious penitential Univer- 



n6 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

sity sermon. It generalised from a single and a 
limited side of Oxford life, as it was said of Simeon 
Stylites that he discerned the hog in Nature and 
mistook Nature for the hog. Amongst the Heads 
whom Cox indiscriminately chastises were Routh, 
Gaisford, Cramer, Jenkyns, Ingram, Hawkins, 
Hampden ; his "untutored Tutors" with their 
bloated pedantry and screechowl throats numbered 
in their ranks such men as Hussey, Newman, the 
two Fabers, Robert Wilberf orce, Vowler Short, and 
Hurrell Froude ; his one blameless junior was but 
a notable comrade in the splendid youthful band 
sampled, and sampled merely, in my last chapter. 
We must bemoan the untimely loss of genius so 
prodigal in its shortened promise ; but, remember- 
ing his own admission that the fingers were not 
always clean which held the pen, we discount the 
Censor's satire with the banished Duke's reply to 
sneering Jaques : 

" For thou thyself hast been a libertine ; 
All the embossed sores and headed evils 
That thou with license of free foot hast caught, 
Wouldst thou disgorge into the general world." 

My undergraduate reminiscences must stop short 
with the early Fifties, at the line of cleavage between 
the Old and New Oxford Comedy. They include 
mad Harry Wilkins of Merton, manumitter of 
Daubeny's apes, who once, an M.A. and Fellow 
of his College, in broad daylight and full term, led 
a mob of rowdy Christchurch undergraduates in a 
duck hunt at the Long Bridges. He came up from 
Harrow in 1840 with a Gregory Exhibition and 
high scholarly repute, but with incipient deafness, 



MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 117 

which increased as years went on. I remember his 
examination in the Schools, his inability to hear 
questions, his cataclysmal answers when they 
reached him. Probably his deafness was calcu- 
lated ; Liddell, one of the examiners, remarked that 
the way to make Mr. Wilkins hear was to question 
him on subjects which he knew ; but there was no 
doubt about his First Class. He was an eloquent 
talker, used to sit kicking his legs on a table, pour- 
ing out to a crowd of listeners classically poised 
sentences like extracts from a review. His life's 
occupation was writing school-books, by which he 
made large sums ; his unrealised ambition was to 
become a nobleman's chaplain, as the next best 
thing to being a nobleman : " My dear fellow, 
think what it would be to be a Marquis a Marquis ! 
my dear fellow." He was a bon vivant, declined 
into a fat Phaeacian, abrogated his Orders, and 
latterly did nothing. 

A very different man was Herbert Coleridge, 
whose Double First in 1852 marked the close of 
the old system, as Sir Robert Peel's in 1808 shed 
lustre on its commencement. The most successful 
Etonian of his day, Newcastle Scholar, and win- 
ning the Balliol while still in the Sixth Form, he was 
unappreciated in a school where athletic eminence 
was the sole title to distinction ; at Oxford he found 
and enjoyed a higher, more congenial level. His 
richly endowed and beautiful mother, Sara Coleridge, 
"last of the three, though eldest born" in Words- 
worth's Triad, theologian, scholar, poetess, her 
father's spiritual child in philosophy, learning, genius, 
yet feminine in grace and sweetness, in domestic 



n8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

tenderness and self-sacrifice, died just before his Class 
was known. She had read with him, his Greek books 
especially, throughout his school and college career. 
He used to acknowledge, it was said, that, while he 
beat her latterly in trained scholarship, she was 
always his superior in vigour of phrasing and in 
delicate verbal felicities. He was fond of talking 
about "my famous grandfather," insomuch that 
he gained the nickname of ov/c aTrainros. He never 
took his degree : by an absurd rule then prevalent 
now, I am told, extinct men taking the B.A. 
with ^300 a year of their own, ranked as " Grand 
Compounders," and, bedizened in scarlet gowns- 
Cox's tulips they were called paid ^100 in fees 
to old Valentine Cox, the Esquire Bedel ; and this 
Coleridge would not do. He turned his attention 
to Philology, inducing the Philological Society to 
announce a new English dictionary on a vast scale, 
to be compiled with aid from volunteers through- 
out the country, and edited by himself. I was one 
of his humble coadjutors, and preserve many letters 
which he wrote to me as the work went on. With 
his death the enterprise fluttered broken-winged and 
fell, to be revived in our own time by Dr. Murray. 
He died in 1861, only thirty years old. Through- 
out a prolonged and distressing illness he laboured 
steadily and cheerfully ; beside him at his death lay 
an unfinished review of Dasent's "Burnt Njal," which 
had employed him almost to the last ; like another 
heroic student, ]. R. Green, "he died learning." 
Eighteen months before the end it was announced 
to him that recovery was hopeless. "Then," said 
he, " I must begin Sanskrit to-morrow." 






MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 119 

To close this chapter of retrospect, let me set 
down the main differences which to an old man 
surveying modern Oxford point the contrast be- 
tween then and now. The first lies in the category 
of dress, whose strict unwritten rules were in the 
Thirties penally enforced and universally observed. 
Men wore, not carried, their academicals in the 
streets ; the Commoner's gown, now shrunk to an 
ugly tippet, floated long and seemly, a sweet robe 
of durance. Even to cricket and to the boats 
black coats and beaver hats were worn, with 
change and re-change upon the spot ; a blazer in 
the High Street would have drawn a mob. A 
frock or tail coat was correct in Hall ; in some 
Colleges even a cut-away, as it was called, provok- 
ing a sconce or fine. A clever group of under- 
graduates in the Forties who presumed to dress 
carelessly Irving, son to the famous preacher; 
Henry Kingsley, who ranked as one of the three 
ugliest men in Oxford 1 and some three or four 
besides, incurred universal obloquy, and were 
known as the intellectual bargees. Nowadays the 
garments of a gentleman are reserved, as high 
school girls tell me that they keep their Long- 
fellow, for Sundays ; while men pulling ladies on 
the river go near to earn the epithet suggested by 
Jonathan Oldbuck for his nephew Hector's Fenians, 
through the frank emergence from amputated trou- 
sers (Calverley's crurum non enarrabile tegmen) of 

1 1 shall not give the names of the other two Calibans. One 
having curly teeth, was known as Curius Dentatus ; the extra- 
ordinary visage of the other was hit off by the inspired nick- 
name, " The Exasperated Oyster." 




120 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

what Clough's Bothie calls their lily-white thighs. 
Even a more potent factor in University change is 
the development of athleticism. At that time there 
was no football and no " sports " ; only one cricket 
field, the tl Magdalen ground/' at the Oxford end of 
Cowley marsh. Comparatively few men boated ; 
outriggers, dinghies, canoes, apolaustic punts were 
unknown. Rich men hunted, followed the drag, 
jumped horses over hurdles on Bullingdon Green, 
drove tandem. This last was more common than 
to-day : from West's, Tollitt's, Figg's, Seckham's 
stables the leader was trotted out a mile or so to 
await an innocent-looking gig, taken off again on 
the return so as to outwit the Proctor. When 
Osborne Gordon was Proproctor, he took his 
chief in a fly one night to the edge of Bagley 
Wood, told the driver to unfasten the horse and 
push the fly into a ditch. The expected tandem 
came pulled up "Can we help you?" said the 
Jehu dismounting, when out stepped the velvet 
sleeves with "Your name and College." The 
plant was complete ; but Gordon had made the 
Proctor promise amnesty, and the men were un- 
molested. 

These were amusements of the wealthy ; the 
great mass of men, whose incomes yielded no 
margin for equestrianism, took their exercise 
in daily walks the words " constitutional " and 
" grind " not yet invented. At two o'clock, in pairs 
or threes, the whole University poured forth for an 
eight or ten miles' toe and heel on the Iffley, Head- 
ington, Abingdon, Woodstock roads, returning to 
five o'clock dinner. The restriction told undoubt- 



MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 121 

edly in favour of intellectual life. The thought 
devoted now to matches and events and high 
jumps and " bikes " moved then on loftier planes ; 
in our walks, no less than in our rooms, then, not 
as now, 

" We glanced from theme to theme, 

Discussed the books to love and hate, 
Or touched the changes of the State, 
Or threaded some Socratic dream. 

There once we held debate, a band 
Of youthful friends, on mind, and art, 
And labour, and the changing mart, 

And all the framework of the land." 

Inly I fear in unathletic days was possible the 
iffluent talk of a Tennyson and Hallam on the 
Cam, on the I sis of a Whately and a Copleston, a 
Newman and a Froude, a Congreve and Mark 
Pattison, Stanley and Jowett, Clough and Matthew 
Arnold brain as against muscle, spirit as against 
flesh, the man as against the animal, the higher as 
against the lower life. 



CHAPTER IX 

SUMMA PAPAVERUM CAPITA 
CHRISTCHURCH 

" See unfading in honours, immortal in years, 
The great Mother of Churchmen and Tories appears" 

NEW OXFORD SAUSAGE. 

" Presence-of-Mind " Smith " Planting Peckwater " Gaisford His 
Achievements as a Scholar His brusquerie Helen Douglas 
"Brigadier" Barnes Dr. Jelf Pusey A Veiled Prophet 
His Mother, Lady Lucy Pusey Pusey's Personal Characteristics 
His Brother the Agriculturist Roots, Esculent and Hebrew 
A Religious Vivisector How Pusey got his Hebrew Professorship 
My Relations with him The Sacrificial Lamb Attitude 
towards Biblical Criticism and Free Thought His Sermons 
Dicta The Year 1855 Other Chronicles of Christchurch 
Liddell His Greatness Max Muller Ouseley The Jelf Row 
The Thunny Lewis Carroll His Girl Play-fellows Why his 
Friendships with them Ended A Personality Apart. 

OF men, no less than plants, the upgrowth and 
stature are unequal. The tallest ears in Thrasy- 
bulus' cornfield, the proudest poppies in Tarquin's 
garden, were, to use the metaphor of Prospero, 
" trashed for overtopping " ; and so, inter silvas 
Academi, some men stand out conspicuous to the 
backward glance of memory above the haze which 
shrouds the lower levels of the generations past, 
claiming to be " taken off " in milder sense than by 
the enigmatic cruelty of the Grecian or Etruscan 
tyrant. Let me embalm in fragmentary guise some 




CHRISTCHURCH 123 

relics of the wit and wisdom of those once laurelled 
now half-forgotten heroes. 

In the august procession of Colleges Christchurch 
leads the way. Its Dean at the opening of the 
Thirties /cal yap eri, Srjv TJV was " Presence-of- 
Mind" Smith. The tradition which explains the 
name, and which has diverted many University 
generations, may perhaps now be consigned to 
oblivion. Smith's daughter Cecilia was engaged 
(and afterwards married) to Richard Harington of 
Brasenose. Harington was Proctor, and with the 
young lady and her party attended a concert at the 
Star. Behind them sat some Christchurch men, 
who amused themselves by removing with a sharp 
knife the " penwiper," of no utility and of uncertain 
origin, worn by noblemen and proctors. What was 
to be done with the trophy ? They hurried home, 
pinned the penwiper to the Dean's door, and retired 
into the obscurity of the adjacent archway. Tom 
Gate opened, the carriage drove to the steps, the 
party ascended to the door. A hand, stretched to 
ring the bell, was arrested by the novel ornament ; 
it was taken down and handed round. " Why, it is 
Dick's penwiper," said Miss Cecilia's voice, as she 
fingered the back-piece of her lover's toga ; and a 
chorus of Samsonic laughter was heard retiring up 
to Peckwater. 

Peckwater enriched the Oxford vocabulary 
with a proverb in the reign of Smith's successor, 
Gaisford. During one of his periodical quarrels 
with the men, some of them scaled his garden 
wall in the night, dug up a quantity of shrubs, 
and planted them in Peckwater, which was found 



i2 4 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

next morning verdant with unwonted boskage ; 
and for many years "planting Peckwater" was 
synonymous with a Christchurch row. Gaisford 
became Dean unexpectedly ; the men came up 
in October, 1831, to find his grim person in Smith's 
vacated stall. Smith appears to have been uneasy 
at Oxford, while Gaisford longed to return to it 
from Durham. So in some occult fashion Bishop 
Van Mildert, whose niece was Gaisford's wife, 
effected an exchange; Gaisford came to the 
deanery, Smith subsided into one of the Silver 
Canonries of Durham ; his portrait hangs in the 
Castle. Gaisford was no divine ; he preached 
annually in the cathedral on Christmas Day, and 
a sentence from one of his sermons reverberated 
into term-time. 

" Nor can I do better, in conclusion, than impress upon you 
the study of Greek literature, which not only elevates above 
the vulgar herd, but leads not infrequently to positions of con- 
siderable emolument." 

The muse had taught him, as she taught Horace, malignum 
spernere vulgas. 

He was a rough and surly man ; had owed his 
rise originally to Cyril Jackson, who discovered 
the genius of the obscure freshman, gave him a 
Christchurch studentship, and watched over him. 
" You will never be a gentleman," said the " Great 
Dean" to his protege with lordly candour, "but 
you may succeed with certainty as a scholar. 
Take some little known Greek author, and throw 
your knowledge into editing it : that will found 
your reputation." Gaisford selected the great 
work on Greek metres of the Alexandrian gram- 





CHRISTCHURCH 125 

marian Hephaestion, annotated it with marvellous 
erudition, and became at once a classical authority. 
In 1811 Lord Liverpool, with a highly complimen- 
tary letter, offered him the Professorship of Greek : 
he replied : " My Lord, I have received your letter, 
and accede to its contents. Yours, etc/' The 
gaucherie came to Cyril Jackson's ears; he sent 
for Gaisford, dictated a proper acknowledgment, 
and made him send it to the Prime Minister with 
a handsomely bound copy of his Hephaestion. 
He never lectured ; but the higher Oxford scholar- 
ship gained world-wide lustre from his produc- 
tions. His Suidas and Etymologicon Magnum 
are glorified in Scott's Homerics on the strife 
between Wellington's and Peel's supporters for 
the Chancellorship. 

'AAA' oo-oi is KatfeS/o^v irepl BooTropov ^ye/ocfl 
8va) SoAi^ocr/cta TraAAoov 
ofs Sa/xv^o 
ov 8vo y 

rAcuev drap[j,vKTOi(ri 7T/)ocrw7ra(rt 

oi'ot vvv PporoL tier 6 Se /uv /5ea TraAAe Kat otos. 

In a facetious record of the Hebdomadal Board 
Meeting in 1851 to protest against University 
Reform, he is quoted as professing that he found 
no relaxation so pleasant on a warm afternoon 
as to lie on a sofa with a Suidas in one's arms. 
These Lexica, with his Herodotus, won cordial 
respect from German scholars, who had formed 
their estimate of Oxford from third-rate perfor- 
mances like Dr. Shaw's "Apollonius Rhodius." 
His son used to relate how, going with his father 
to call on Dindorf at Leipsic, the door was opened 



126 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

by a shabby man whom they took to be the 
famulus, but who on the announcement of Gais- 
ford's name rushed into his arms and kissed him. 
Poor Shaw's merits ; on the other hand, they ap- 
praised with contumely. The "Apollonius" was 
re-edited, I think, by Bockh, whose volume was 
eagerly scanned by Shaw in hopes of some com- 
plimentary recognition. At last he found cited 
one of his criticisms with the appended comment 
" Putidissime Shavius" ! Gaisf ord was an unamiable 
Head, lessjthan cordial to the Tutors, and speaking 
roughly to his little boys. He nominated my old 
schoolfellow, "Sam" Gardiner the historian, to a 
studentship. Sam became an Irvingite, and thought 
it right to inform the Dean, who at once sent for 
the College books and erased Gardiner's name. 
He had a liking for old Hancock, the porter at 
Canterbury Gate, with whom he often paused to 
joke, and whom he called the Archbishop of 
Canterbury. Hancock once presumed so far as 
to invite the Decanal party under that name to 
tea : I do not think they condescended to immure 
themselves in those unwholesome subterranean 
rooms of his. The story of the Dean of Oriel's 
compliments to the Dean of Christchurch is true 
in part. The Dean Minor was Chase ; the Dean's 
remark, not written but spoken to his neighbour, 
was, "Oh! yes Alexander the Coppersmith to 
Alexander the Great." Equally confused is the 
tradition of his daughter's suitor. It runs that 
W. E. Jelf proposed to Miss Gaisford, who refused 
him ; that Gaisford urged his deserts, as of a 
scholar knowing more about 76 than any man in 




CHRISTCHURCH 127 

Oxford : that the young lady answered ft it might 
be so, but she herself knew too much about fiev 
to accept him." Those who remember Gaisford will 
doubt if his respect for Greek would overbear 
his indignation that a mere Tutor should cast 
eyes upon his daughter ; those who knew Osborne 
Gordon will give a tolerable guess at the origin 
of the story. A story indeed there was ; of love 
strong as death, of brave and patient constancy, 
of bright too brief fruition, not to be profaned 
by mention here. Est et fideli tuta silentio merces. 
I am growing tragic, and, as Wordsworth sings, 
the moving accident is not my trade. Let me 
end off old Gaisford's cenotaph with lines com- 
posed, it was believed, by Henry Cotton, after- 
wards Archdeacon of Cashel, who assumed certainly 
in conceiving them the sock rather than the buskin, 
when Gaisford, unloverlike, slovenly, black-a-vised, 
wooed and won his first wife, the beautiful Helen 
Douglas : 

" Here's to the maid who so graceful advances ; 

J Tis fair Helen Douglas, if right I divine. 
Cupid, thou classical god of soft glances, 
Teach me to ogle and make the nymph mine. 

Look on a Tutor true, 

Helen, for love of you, 
Just metamorphosed from blacksmith to beau 

Hair combed and breeches new, 

Love has changed Roderick Dhu, 
While every gownsman cries, wondering, ' Oho ! ' 

In Greek, I believe, I must utter my passion, 
For Greek's more familiar than English to me ; 

And Byron of late has brought Greek into fashion, 
There's some in his * Fair Maid of Athens' let's see. 



128 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

But this vile modern Greek 
Never will do to speak ; 

Let me try ZUTJ /AOU <ras dyarru ? 

Pshaw ! I don't like the tone ; 
Let me now try my own 
K\vdi (lev 'EX^i?, ffov yap fyw. 



But here comes a handsome young spark whom I plucked once. 

Perhaps he'll make love to her out of mere spite ; 
Aye, touch thy cap and be proud of thy luck, dunce, 
But Greek will go farther than grins, if I'm right. 
By Dis the infernal god, 
See, see they smile they nod 



Oh ! should my faithless flame 
Love this young Malcolm Graeme, 

"Ororoi TOTOTOI ev 



Thank heaven ! there's one I don't see much about her, 

Tis her townsman, the Tutor of Oriel, Fitz- James ; 
For though of the two I am somewhat the stouter, 
His legs are far neater, and older his claims. 

Yet every Christchurch blade 

Says I have won the maid ; 
Every one, Dean and Don, swears it is so. 

Honest Lloyd, blunt and bluff, 

Levett and Goodenough, 
All clap my back and cry ' Roderick's her beau.' 



Come then, your influence propitious be shedding, 

Ye Gnomes of Greek metres, since crowned are my hopes ; 
Waltz in Trochaic time, waltz at my wedding, 
Nymphs who preside over accent and tropes. 
Scourge of false quantities, 
Ghost of Hephaestion, rise ! 
Haply to this my success I may owe ; 
Come sound the Doric string, 
Let us in concert sing, 
Joy to Hephaestion Black Roderick, and Co." 






CHRISTCHURCH 129 

Gaisford's senior Canon was " Brigadier " Barnes, 
a name persistent to the end of his long life be- 
cause he had borne it in the Oxford Volunteer 
Corps of 1803. To him was always attributed what 
is I suppose the archetype of leading questions, 
launched at a floundering youth in a Homer exa- 
mination " Who dragged whom how many times 
round the walls of what ? " All the Canons, except 
Pusey, were more or less nepotist in their nomina- 
tion to Studentships ; but none of them came up 
to Barnes. " I don't know what we're coming 
to ! I've given studentships to my sons, and to 
my nephews, and to my nephews' children, and 
there are no more of my family left. I shall have 
to give them by merit one of these days ! " I 
knew him as a large, red-faced, kindly, very deaf 
old gentleman, with three pleasant daughters, who 
gave evening parties. To one of these came upon 
a time Mrs. and the Miss Lloyds, widow and 
daughters of Bagot's predecessor in the Oxford 
See. The youngest girl had engaged herself to 
Sanctuary, an undergraduate of Exeter. The 
mother frowned on the attachment ; the sisters 
favoured it. Sanctuary's rooms in Exeter com- 
manded the Lloyd's dwelling, which was next door 
to Kettel Hall ; and so it came to pass that when 
mamma went out, a canary was hung outside the 
drawing-room window, and the young gentleman 
walked across. 1 Old Barnes had imbibed from 
his daughters some hazy notion of the liaison, and 
greeted the pretty rebel, of whom he was very 

1 " Je 1'ai vu," wrote old Canon Tristram on reading this. 

I 



130 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

fond, with a loud " How do you do, dear Miss , 

and how is Mr. Tabernacle ? " 

Another Canon meriting record was Dr. Jelf. 
He was also Principal of King's College, London, 
and therein instrumental in expelling F. D. Maurice 
from his Professorship, as a tribute to the majesty 
of everlasting fire. He had been tutor of the blind 
King of Hanover, whose full-length portrait in oils 
adorned the drawing-room, and he had married 
a Hanoverian, a highly accomplished Countess 
Schlippenbach. Her presence, and that of two 
young musical daughters, made his house exceed- 
ingly attractive during his canonical residence. I 
remember taking the tenor part with the young 
ladies in Mendelssohn's Quartetts, while Thomson, 
afterwards Archbishop, sang the bass. I recall too 
a dinner party one day when I championed 
Johnson's " Rambler " against general disparage- 
ment, until from the head of the table Jelf in- 
terposed, thanked me for what I had said, and 
told us that at a critical period in his own life 
he had owed very much to certain Papers in the 
" Rambler." 

Of Buckland and of Bull I have spoken ; there 
remains Pusey. In those days he was a Veiled 
Prophet, always a recluse, and after his wife's 
death, in 1839, invisible except when preaching. 
He increased as Newman decreased ; the name 
"Puseyite" took the place of " Newmanite." As 
mystagogue, as persecuted, as prophet, he appealed 
to the romantic, the generous, the receptive natures ; 
no sermons attracted undergraduates as did his. I 
can see him passing to the pulpit through the 



CHRISTCHURCH 131 

crowds which overflowed the shabby, inconvenient, 
unrestored cathedral, the pale, ascetic, furrowed 
face, clouded and dusky always as with suggestions 
of a blunt or half-used razor, the bowed grizzled 
head, the drop into the pulpit out of sight until the 
hymn was over, then the harsh, unmodulated voice, 
the high-pitched devotional patristicism, the dog- 
mas, obvious or novel, not so much ambassadorial 
as from a man inhabiting his message ; now and 
then the search-light thrown with startling vividness 
on the secrets hidden in many a hearer's heart. 
Some came once from mere curiosity and not 
again, some felt repulsion, some went away alarmed, 
impressed, transformed. It was in the beginning 
of the Fifties that I first came to know him well, 
sometimes in his brother's house at Pusey, some- 
times in his own. His mother, too, I knew, Lady 
Lucy Pusey, a dame of more than ninety years, 
preserving the picturesque dress and sweet though 
formal manners of Richardson's Cedar Parlour. 
She remembered driving under Temple Bar with 
her mother as a little girl, and being told to look up 
and see the last "traitor's" head still mouldering on 
its spike. She would tell me stories of her school, 
where the girls sat daily in a horrible machine con- 
structed to Procrusteanise a long and graceful neck 
by drawing up the head and chin ; of her wedding 
introduction to Queen Charlotte's drawing-room, 
borne in her sedan chair by brown-coated 
"Johnnies" and attended by running footmen with 
silk coats and wax flambeaux; of the " reverend 
gentleman '' from Oxford who rode over to Pusey 
each Sunday morning in boots and cords, read 



132 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

prayers in the little church, dined in the servants' 
hall, and carried his ministrations and his boots to 
two other parishes for the afternoon. She used 
old-fashioned pronunciations, such as t'other, 
'ooman, 'em for them. " Green tea poisonous ? 
look at me. I'm an old 'ooman of ninety-two, and 
I've drunk strong green tea all my life ! " She loved 
to talk of Ed'ard, as she called her famous son, re- 
lating how, when he gained his First Class and his 
father begged him to claim some valuable comme- 
morative present, he asked for a complete set of the 
Fathers ; and how in the Long Vacation he used to 
carry his folios to a shady corner in the garden 
which she pointed out, and sit there reading with a 
tub of cold water close at hand, into which he 
plunged his curly head whenever study made it 
ache. She died, I think, in 1858 ; her sedan chair, 
in which she regularly went to church on Sunday 
from her house in Grosvenor Square, and which 
attracted always a little crowd of onlookers, was 
one of the last used in England. 

Two things impressed me when I first saw 
Dr. Pusey close : his exceeding slovenliness of 
person ; buttonless boots, necktie limp, intonsum 
mentum> unbrushed coat collar, grey hair "all-to- 
ruffled " ; and the almost artificial sweetness of his 
smile, contrasting as it did with the sombre gloom 
of his face when in repose. He lived the life of a 
godly eremite : reading no newspapers, he was 
unacquainted with the commonest names and 
occurrences ; and was looked upon with alarm 
in the Berkshire neighbourhood, where an old lady, 
much respected as "a deadly one for prophecy," 







PUSEY 

From a pen-and-ink drawing of the Thirties 
Photographed from the Print by Mrs. Frieda Girdlestone 



CHRISTCHURCH 133 

had identified him with one of the three frogs which 
were to come out of the dragon's mouth. His 
brother, the renowned agriculturist, would intro- 
duce him to visitors with the aphorism that one of 
them dealt in esculent, the other in Hebrew roots ; 
but, like his friend and follower Charles Marriott, he 
had no small talk, and would sit absolutely silent in 
strange company. Into external society he never 
went; was once persuaded by his old friend and 
neighbour Sir Robert Throgmorton to meet at 
dinner the Roman Catholic antiquary and theo- 
logian Dr. Rock ; but he came back bewailing that 
Dr. Rock had opened controversy so soon as they 
sat down, had kept it up after the ladies had left the 
table, had walked homewards with him in order to 
pursue it, flinging a last word after his opponent 
as they parted at Mr. Pusey's lodge-gate. In 
contrast to his disinclination for general talk was 
his morbid love of groping in the spiritual interiors 
of those with whom he found himself alone. He 
would ask of strangers questions which but for his 
sweet and courteous manner they must have deemed 
impertinent. I had not been in his company a 
week before he had extracted my past history, habit 
of mind, future aims. Persons who evaded his 
questionings fell in his opinion ; he denounced 
as reprobate a sullen groom who drove him in 
and out of Oxford, and who had repelled his 
attempts at inquisition : the habit of acting towards 
others as a confessor seemed to have generated 
a scientific pleasure in religious vivisection. He 
had countless clients of this kind ; women chiefly, 
but young men, too, as readers of Mark Pattison's 



134 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

" Memoirs " will recollect. Flys came to the door, 
from which descended ladies, Una-like in wimple 
and black stole, "as one that inly mourned," 
obtained their interview, and went away. He paid 
frequent visits for the same purpose to Miss Sellon's 
institution Chretien's wicked witticism will recur 
to some who read 1 and on our occasional visits 
to Wantage, where Butler reigned as vicar, with 
Liddon and Mackonochie as his curates, we were 
detained till late at night while he gave audience to 
ladies of the place. Sisterhoods were his especial 
delight and admiration ; he had begun to work 
for their establishment in 1840, somewhat against 
Newman's judgment; his eager support of them 
being rooted less in the benefit they might confer 
on the community than as a means of securing 
their votaries in the virginity which he had come to 
look upon as the highest state of life. He made 
an idol of celibacy, exerting all his influence on 
one occasion and setting many springs in motion to 
enlist in the Clewer Home a young orphan lady 
whose friends deemed her not old enough for such 
a life, and treating his ultimate discomfiture as 
a victory of Evil over Good. His obscurantist 
dread of worldly influences begot the feeling that no 
young woman was safe except in a nunnery, no 
young man except in Orders. He would urge men 
to be ordained at the earliest possible period : 
controversial knowledge, systematic reading, theo- 
logical erudition, might come afterwards ; if only 

1 There was a foolish report of his contemplated marriage to 
Miss Sellon : Chretien of Oriel remarked that the offspring of 
the alliance would be known as the " Pusey Miscellany? 



CHRISTCHURCH 



135 



the youth were pious, earnest, docile, the great 
thing was to fix, to secure, to capture him. 

In learning Pusey stood probably supreme 
amongst English divines of his century : the other 
leaders of the movement even Keble, much more 
Newman were by comparison half-educated men. 
They knew no German he was an adept ; they 
were not Orientalists he had toiled over five years 
for sixteen hours a day at Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldee, 
under the Semitic scholar Freytag. His vast 
patristic knowledge is shown in his exhaustive 
catenae, and in the " Library of the Fathers " 
which he conceived and conducted. He was 
familiar with the entire range of Protestant Refor- 
mation literature, with the English Deists of the 
seventeenth century, with the German Rationalists 
of the nineteenth. His appreciation of language 
as the vital genius of cultured human thought was 
not so much an acquirement as spontaneous ; 
corresponding felicities of diction in one or another 
tongue seemed to present themselves to him in- 
stinctively and without effort : Keble, his examiner 
in the Schools, used to say that Pusey's construe 
of Pindar revealed to him for the first time a 
perfect English equivalent of the magnificent 
dithyrambic roll which he had believed to be 
untransferable. 

Pusey's religious development was gradual. 
Brought up in lax traditional English Church- 
manship, he was early attracted by, and always 
loved, the Evangelicals, sharing their deep rever- 
ence for the written Word, and their dislike of 
what he called " Orthodoxism," the " godless ortho- 



136 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

doxy " of Mark Pattison's essay an exaltation, 
that is, of form and phrase above the realities 
they were constructed to convey. He was initiated 
into controversy through a brilliant schoolfellow 
and friend, Julian Hibbert, who, a sceptic even 
while at Eton, became later a pugnacious atheist. 
Pusey determined to face and fight out the diffi- 
culties which Hibbert's arguments had raised, and, 
after taking his degree at Oxford, betook himself 
to the German Universities, where, more vigorously 
than elsewhere in Europe, Rationalism at that time 
flourished. He often spoke in after years of the 
kindness shown to him by the professors at Got- 
tingen and Berlin ; they listened to his arguments, 
maintained or sometimes modified their own. 
Their influence on his mind appeared in his first 
published work, a defence of German teaching 
against a powerful attack made upon it by Hugh 
James Rose. Later he came to think that he had 
judged his friends too leniently, felt alarm at the 
tendency of their destructive criticism, and with- 
drew his book from circulation. 

In one of our walks he told me of his appoint- 
ment to the Hebrew Professorship. He had been a 
favourite with Lloyd, who held besides his Oxford 
bishopric the post of Divinity Professor, and who 
when at Cuddesdon or in London gave up his 
Christchurch house and library to his young friend's 
use. Pusey owned a Hebrew Bible with large folio 
interleavings, and these were filled with the notes of 
ten years' study. Once the Bishop came suddenly 
to his house, and Pusey, vacating it in a hurry, left 
his folio behind. It caught Lloyd's eye : he examined 



CHRISTCHURCH 13? 

it, and gave it back without remark ; but when soon 
afterwards Dr. Nicol died and Sir Robert Peel 
consulted Lloyd as to the appointment, he strongly 
recommended Pusey, who became Regius Pro- 
fessor at the age of twenty-nine. Lloyd cautioned 
him " Remember, you must be circumspect, you 
will be <j)9ovepwv (frdovepcbraros." Lord Radnor, the 
head of the family, was just then in vehement 
Opposition, and the Duke of Wellington's colleagues 
attacked him for patronising a Bouverie. " How 
could I help it," said the Duke, "when they told 
me he was the best man ? " He was a laborious 
Professor, but a dull lecturer. His lectures, given 
in his library, were conversational, not continuous 
or methodised; his manner hesitating, iterative, 
involved ; you had to look out for and painfully 
disentangle the valuable learning they contained. 
Rarely his subject would inspire him. Once at the 
close of a wearisome disquisition on Isaiah xxi. he 
suddenly woke up at the words, lt Watchman, what 
of the night ? " gave a swift, brilliant, exhaustive 
paraphrase of those two oracular verses, sent us 
away electrified and wondering. Two other 
incidents from the lecture room rise up before me. 
He was laying down the probable site of ancient 
Tyre, when an eccentric student broke in to quote 
from memory Grote's dictum on the subject, dif- 
fering altogether from the Doctor's. He looked 
scared for a moment at the interruption, then 
smilingly reserved the point, and told us next time 
that he had read Grote's note and acceded to his 
view. Another day I noticed that he was un- 
wontedly distrait, casting glances towards the same 



138 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

student, who, always nervous and restless, was 
crumpling in his fingers a scrap of written paper. 
When the room cleared and I remained to chat, as 
I sometimes did, he joyously pounced upon the 
paper, which had fallen under a chair, and showed 
it to me crammed with manuscript in his own 
minute handwriting, representing as he told me 
two days' labour, which would have been lost to 
him had young Fidgety destroyed it. 

He early gave me a proof of his regard, vouch- 
safed I was told only to a few, in setting me to work 
for him : successive pages from Greek and Latin 
which I translated look me now in the face when I 
open his " Catena on the Eucharist." But he would 
let no one else overwork me, for I had much on my 
hands at the time ; and when he heard poor Edward 
Herbert, then an Eton boy, murdered afterwards 
by Greek brigands, petition me to read Virgil with 
him in the evenings, interposed an eager negative 
" Mr. Tuckwell's evening is the poor man's one 
ewe lamb, and I will not have it sacrificed." Twice 
he spoke to me of his wife, whom he had loved at 
eighteen, married at twenty-eight, lost at thirty-nine. 
A common friend was sacrificing an important 
sphere of work in order to seek with his delicate 
wife a warmer climate, and I asked him no 
doubt a priggish query if the abandonment were 
justifiable on the highest grounds. "Justifiable ? " 
he said, " I would have given up anything and 

gone anywhere, but " ; his voice shook, the 

aposiopesis remained unfilled. Once afterwards I 
was with him in his drawing-room at Oxford. It 
had been newly papered when the family from 



:HRISTCHURCH 139 

Pusey came to live with him. He told me that the 
former paper had been chosen by his wife, and 
that to cover it up had pained him, but pointed 
with a sad smile to a corner where the fresh paper 
had been rubbed away (by his own fingers I 
suspected) and an inch or two of the old pattern 
disclosed. He was greatly amused by a report, 
which I repeated to him as current in Oxford, that 
he punished his children for their misdeeds by 
holding their fingers in the candle as an antepast 
of hell-fire. He said he had never punished his 
children in his life, and his son Philip, to whom 
the tradition was repeated, added that the nearest 
approach to punishment he could recollect was 
when his father, looking over his shoulder as he 
read a novel on a Sunday, pulled his ear and said, 
" Oh, Phil, you heathen ! " The well-known 
anecdote of the lamb he corrected for me. He 
was in the three-horse omnibus which used to run 
from Oxford to the railway at Steventon, and a 
garrulous lady talked to him of the Newmanites 
and of Dr. Pusey, adding that the latter, she was 
credibly informed, sacrificed a lamb every Friday. 
"I thought I ought to tell her,' ; he said; "so I 
answered, ' My dear madam, I am Dr. Pusey, and 
I do not know how to kill a lamb.' " 

In argument he was always modest and candid. 
Mr. Algernon Herbert, the eccentric, the omniscient, 
the adorable, was referring Christ's miracles to 
personal magnetism and medica fides ; to no innate 
thaumaturgic power that is, but to a passionate 
belief on the part of the recipients which acted on 
their bodily frames. Pusey frankly accepted the 



1 40 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

theory as regarded the healing of functional maladies, 
citing modern instances in support of it, but point- 
ing out that the explanation failed to cover the 
removal of organic disease ; that when, for instance, 
a man born blind was reported to have gained 
eyesight, you must accept the miracle or deny the 
fact. He owned that a six days' Creation could 
not be literally maintained, for he had attended 
Buckland's lectures ; and he renounced on Rol- 
leston' s remonstrance his belief in a simultaneous 
universal deluge. When Darwin's book came out, 
he asked Rolleston whether the species existing 
upon the globe five thousand years ago might not 
have been so few as to be contained in an Ark of 
the dimensions given in Genesis. " I would not 
answer him," said Rolleston in his blunt way ; " I 
knew he would quote me as an authority." I 
pressed him once to say whether, in his opinion, 
morality without faith or faith without morality 
were the more hopeful state. He did not like my 
way of putting it, and fenced with the question for 
a time, giving the preference at last to faith without 
morality, but owning his verdict to be paradoxical, 
and laughing heartily when I reminded him of the 
sound Churchman in Boswell's " Johnson," 1 who 
never entered church, but never passed the door 
without pulling off his hat. I quoted a recent 
Charge by Bishop Blomfield containing strong 

1 "Boswell," vol. ii. p. 195 ; ed. 1835. "Campbell is a good 
man, a pious man ; I am afraid he has not been in the inside 
of a church for many years, but he never passes a church 
without pulling off his hat. This shows that he has good 
principles." 



CHRISTCHURCH 141 

doctrinal statements. He said that he had not 
read and should not read it : " He has been a 
Bishop twenty years, has given, they say, eight 
hours a day to the merely mechanical work of his 
diocese ; what time has he had to read, or what is 
his opinion worth on questions of theology or 
doctrine ? " The ritualistic practices just begin- 
ning to appear he regarded with distaste, as pre- 
sumptuous and mistaken ; his strong disapproba- 
tion of their later developments is recorded in a 
recent "Life of Goulburn." We called upon an 
adjacent rector, who showed us proudly as a 
virtutis opus his newly made reredos surmounted 
by a large cross, admitting that in consequence 
of its erection several parishioners had ceased to 
attend the service. Pusey said to me as we drove 
away, " I would never put up a cross in any 
church, feeling certain that it would offend some 
one." Alluding once to his own alleged hetero- 
doxy, he challenged us to find any rule of the 
Church which he had ever broken. Rubric in 
hand, we catechised him, but he stood the test, 
owning indeed that he always stayed away from 
the Gunpowder Plot Service, but refusing to re- 
cognise a Royal Warrant as canonical. 

He had no familiar acquaintance with our older 
English classics ; a quotation from Cowley, Dryden, 
Pope, seemed to touch in him a latent string, but 
awoke no literary association ; for Dr. Johnson 
indeed he professed loyal admiration less, I fancy, 
for the author of " Rasselas," the " Rambler," and 
the " Lives," than for the scrupulous High Church- 
man who drank his tea without milk and ate his 



1 42 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

buns without currants upon Good Friday. Of 
modern publications not theological he read ab- 
solutely nothing ; one of his nieces pressed on him 
for a railway journey Miss Yonge's " Heartsease," 
just then in vogue, but he could not get through 
the opening chapter ; his sympathies, all wide as 
they were, failed to vibrate to the poor child-bride's 
sorrows. He was a staunch defender of absent 
friends ; when a visitor spoke disparagingly once 
of Dr. J. M. Neale, another time of Dean Lake, he 
flared up on their behalf with an energy for which 
he afterwards apologised. For freethinkers he had 
the deepest repugnance ; his outbreak when I 
quoted admiringly Fronde's fine paper on the 
Study of History in the ll Oxford Essays " rever- 
berated through the family. He seemed to feel 
something like alarm in the presence of neologian 
writers, English or German, as of antagonists 
whose arrows threatened weak points in his 
armour. He recounted to me the curiosity 
first, the later uneasiness, with which, while in 
Germany, he listened to the Professors' lectures. 
I told him how Shuttleworth, when at Holland 
House as tutor and engaged in controversy with 
Allen, "Lady Holland's infidel," demolished his 
attacks on prophecy by citation of Isaiah liii. "The 
Germans," he said with a groan, " would have 
shown Allen how to meet it." The close of his 
life was darkened by this cloud. Newman found 
that Rome, failing him on many points, could at 
least shelter him from Rationalism. To Pusey it 
was a Brocken spectre, dilating in proportion as 
he approached it. Sir Henry Acland has told for 




CHRISTCHURCH 143 

us the dismay with which he looked upon its ad- 
vance ; has recorded, too, the adapted line from 
Horace, 

" Nil desperandum, Christo duce et auspice Christo," 

which, amid all his anxieties, summarised his abiding 
solace. 

He preached every Sunday at Pusey in the little 
church, a tonic change from the ordinary occupant 
of the pulpit, whose homilies Mr. Pusey pronounced 
to be Blair infused with Epictetus. His sermons 
there gave the same overwhelming impression of 
personal saintliness as breathed from them in the 
Christchurch pulpit ; but the language was labo- 
riously simple, arresting the crass Berkshire rustics 
by pithy epigrams which fastened on their minds, 
and which some of them used afterwards to repeat 
to me : " Find out your strong point and make the 
most of it " ; " Seek heaven because it is God's 
throne, not because it is an escape from hell " ; 
" Holiness consists not in doing uncommon things, 
but in doing common things in an uncommon 
way." Of his obiter dicta I recall the following : 
" In the study of theology books are better than 
topics." " The best ecclesiastical history is 
Fleury's." " It is a good thing to know a large 
number of minds." "A carefully written sermon 
or essay cannot be recast or expanded ; its in- 
tegrity is marred by reconstruction." " Discon- 
tinue fasting as dangerous if you feel exhausted 
on the following day." (His own regular Friday 
meal was a poached egg on spinach, with one glass 
of port.) " Bennett, of St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, is 



i 4 4 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

the only man I know who went abroad with waver- 
ing Anglican allegiance and returned an English 
Churchman." " Hooker's chapter on the Eucharist 
is disappointing ; he shirks the logical sequence 
of his grand argument on the Incarnation and 
passes off into mere pious rhapsody." " Luther 
had an irreverent mind; he says that if God had 
pleased to make a bit of stick the Sacrament 
He might have done so." I failed to see the 
irreverence, but he spoke the words whisperingly 
and with a shudder, and I could not question 
him further. 

The year 1855, with which these experiences end, 
marked a transitional period in his life-history. In 
the autumn of the previous year, greatly to his 
surprise, he was elected at the head of the Profes- 
soriate a member of the enlarged Hebdomadal 
Council under the new Act, was fascinated at their 
first encounter, as he told me, by the dashing talk 
and practical energy of his colleague, Jeune, be- 
came, I think, for a time a weapon in that clever 
tactician's hands, at any rate came out of his Achilles 
tent and flung himself with a keen sense of free- 
dom and enjoyment into active legislation for the 
liberated University. Mark Pattison used to say 
that no man of superior intellect and character 
could be yoked unequally to the machine of public 
"business" without moral and mental deteriora- 
tion; and certainly the Pusey of later years, as 
useful for aught I know, was not so great as the 
imposing hierophant of the Forties. He is handled 
saucily in the clever fragment which sprang from 
young Balliol about 1856 : 




CHRISTCHURCH 145 

" Now, stilled the various labours of the day, 
Student and Don the drowsy charm obey. 
E'en Pusey owns the soft approach of sleep, 
Long as his sermons, as his learning deep ; 
Peaceful he rests from Hebraistic lore, 
And finds that calm he gave so oft before." * 

The lines are quite good-humoured, but no longer 
reverential ; they could not have been written ten 
years earlier. I had known him as a devout 
Casaubon, unconscious of contemporary triviali- 
ties, aloof in patristic reverie and in spiritual 
pathology. That at any rate he ceased to be; 
these earlier reminiscences, nowhere hitherto re- 
corded, indicate the close of a chapter in his inner 
as in his outer life. 

But the chronicles of Christchurch are not all in 
canon type. In my bookcase is a finely bound 
Delphin Virgil, a school prize with the legend 
Honoris Causa on its cover, which belonged to 
Charles Atterbury, Senior Student, and Vicar of 
St. Mary Magdalen. A well-bred gentleman, a 
finished scholar, a devoutly efficient pastor, he 
was also an enthusiastic whip, never so happy 
as when handling Costar's thoroughbreds. He 
was destined, like Pope's Cobham, to feel his 
ruling passion strong in death : while driving the 
Birmingham coach he was upset and killed. The 
text of his sermon on the Sunday before had been 
" Set thine house in order ; for thou shalt die, and 
not live." 

In the Thirties Liddell strode the quadrangles, 
already magnificent in presence, less superbly 

1 Appendix I. 

K. 



146 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Olympian than he afterwards became ; I think 
Westminster saw the meridian of his personal 
beauty. Sweeping into the Abbey with his boys 
on a Sunday afternoon, he belittled and uglified 
all the surpliced dignitaries around him ; venerable 
to the last, he yet made one rejoice that the gods 
do not grow old. " None knew/' wrote to me at 
his death one of his most distinguished colleagues 

"None knew how great Liddell was. I rather hope they 
will not have his Life written. Only those who worked with 
him could tell what a depth of tenderness and generosity 
there was in him. He was strangled by the Don, and spent 
his great powers on the Dictionary. Do the greatest of men 
achieve more than one-tenth of their powers?" 

The Life has been written, and we may be grateful 
for it. It has set him right with a half-appreciating 
world ; has taught those who needed to be informed 
that beneath the stern, reserved, austere outside lay a 
man humble, reverent, tender-hearted ; his severity 
straight-forwardness, his hauteur shyness, his re- 
ticence born of the strong self-restraint which 
guarded all utterances by exactest truth, his Stoi- 
cism like that of the Roman Aurelius, like that 
of the Hebrew Preacher " death so dark, and 
all dies ; love it before it dies ; love it because 
it dies ; fear God, love one another, this is the 
whole of man." The cathedral which he beauti- 
fied, the University which he helped to reform, 
the College whose intellectual and moral strain 
he raised, will not behold a nobler man. 

Of Christchurch, too, his friend of many years, 
Max Miiller, was an adopted son. I recall the 
black-haired slight young foreigner in 1847, or 




CHRISTCHURCH 147 

thereabouts, known first as a pianist in Oxford 
drawing-rooms, whose inmates ceased their chatter 
at his brilliant touch. I remember the contest for 
the Sanskrit Professorship, wherein I voted, and 
as far as I could worked for him ; an inferior 
candidate being preferred before him, first because 
Max was a " Germaniser," secondly because a friend 
of Bunsen must of necessity be heretical, thirdly 
because it was unpatriotic to confer an English 
Chair on any but an Englishman. The horror of 
everything German was of very ancient date. Old 
Tatham of Lincoln, in his famous two-and-a-half- 
hour sermon on the Three Heavenly Witnesses, 
wished "all the Jarman critics at the bottom of 
the Jarman Ocean." The sermon ended thus : 
"The further elucidation of this subject I leave 
to those learned Doctors and dignitaries whom I 
see before me ; who, receiving large emoluments for 
doing little, are content with doing less. And now, 
&c." I attended his stimulating philological lectures ; 
learning from his lips the then novel doctrine of the 
Aryan migrations and the rationale of Greek myths : 
the charm of his delivery heightened by a few Ger- 
manisms of pronunciation and terminology ; moost 
for "must," dixonary for "vocabulary." He con- 
sulted me later about two matters in which, strange 
to say, I was better informed than he, the art of 
budding roses and the conduct of marine aquaria. 
He watched me one day in my garden putting in 
some buds, and tried his hand ; but gave it up 
presently, saying : " While you are budding a 
dozen standards I can earn .5 by writing an 
article." I was his guest sometimes in his pretty 



148 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

home opposite the Magdalen elms, where played 
Deichmann 

" Whose bowing seemed made 
For a hand with a jewel," 

where Jenny Lind warbled, Charles Kingsley 
stammered in impassioned tete-d-tete. I read with 
delight some years ago his "Auld Lang Syne," 
pasting into it an 1860 portrait of his then clear- 
cut face, as a corrective to the more commonplace 
outlines of the elderly presentment, which, hardly 
suiting the title, decorates the frontispiece of his 
book. 

As I think of him in his earlier musical Oxford 
days, there comes before me a more wonderful 
pianist, who had taken his degree, but was still 
resident at Christchurch, when Max Miiller first 
appeared. Few now remember Sir Frederick 
Ouseley's playing at the amateur concerts in the 
earlier Forties ; the slight form and dark foreign face, 
the prolonged rubbing and twisting of the mobile 
hands before they were placed upon the instru- 
ment ; the large, prominent, opal eyes, in fine frenzy 
rolling over the audience as the piece went on, the 
executant brilliancy of the marvellous performance, 
with constructive development and contrapuntal 
skill which the highest English adepts professed 
themselves unable to emulate. Like Handel, Men- 
delssohn, Mozart, he was born a musical prodigy ; 
but he lacked serious training ; the early golden 
years were wasted by his relatives in petting, not 
instructing, him ; Greek and Latin, which he hated, 
were forced upon him ; a clerical career and 




SIR FREDERICK OUSELEY 

From a Photograph taken about 1856 




CHRISTCHURCH 149 

ritualistic excitements distracted him. Even so, he 
was nothing short of a very great musician. He 
was probably there is wealth of competent con- 
sensus in the verdict one of the greatest extem- 
pore players who ever lived. Often, in days of 
yore, have I stood amongst a group round his 
piano challenging him to improvise. He always 
asked for a subject. Some man would supply a 
theme, perhaps intentionally intricate. In a few 
moments he would begin, and the piece would 
grow under his hand with a wealth of resource, a 
command of technical device, a fertility of ima- 
gination, and a skilful elaboration of complicated 
texture, 

" Untwisting all the chains that tie 
The hidden soul of harmony " 

which raised it to the rank of a great classical 
masterpiece. His knowledge of the history of 
music was unique ; his library, finely equipped in 
other departments of literature, inherited from his 
father, contained not only endless autograph and 
unpublished scores, but several hundred works on 
music in many languages, all of which, an accom- 
plished linguist, he had read and mastered. His 
musical degree and his acceptance of the Professor- 
ship were looked upon by the Dons as ignomini- 
ous condescensions; though old Gaisford loyally 
attended the performance in the Theatre of his 
Mus.Doc. exercise, the oratorio of " Polycarp," in 
which his friend Madame Dolby sang the sweet 
contralto solos. As Professor he raised to a very 
high pitch the standard of graduate qualification, and 
delivered erudite lectures, of which only meagre 



150 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

reports remain. From his many compositions a 
couple of anthems and two or three hymns alone 
seem likely to survive ; his ultimate repute will, 
I fear, be altogether incommensurate with his vast 
powers. 

Apart from exceptional men like these, intel- 
lectually as historically, Christchurch held its own. 
The Common Room in the Thirties contained 
seniors such as Foster Lloyd, F.R.S., and Political 
Economy Professor ; Robert Hussey, a monument 
of erudition, not yet grimly saturnine as he became 
in later years ; Jacob Ley, the greatly beloved, who 
probably, like Dominie Sampson, " evinced! even 
from his cradle an uncommon seriousness of dis- 
position." Of the juniors were Bode, Hertford 
Scholar, author of the hymn "O Jesus, I have 
promised " ; W. E. Jelf ; Osborne Gordon, Ireland 
Scholar and Double First; Linwood, Hertford, 
Ireland, Craven Scholar, and, a little later, Kitchin, 
Double First, now Dean of Durham. Linwood 
was nephew to the once celebrated Miss Linwood, 
whose needlework imitation of great paintings drew 
crowds to her Exhibition Rooms in Leicester 
Square. He is known to the present generation as 
compiler of the " Anthologia Oxoniensis." He was 
a rough, shabby fellow when I remember him, 
living in London, and coming up to examine in the 
Schools, where he used to scandalise his colleagues 
by proposing that for the adjudication of Classes 
they should " throw into the fire all that other 
rubbish, and go by the Greek Prose." It was said 
of him that somewhat late in life, reading St. Paul's 
Epistles for the first time, and asked by Gaisford 




CHRISTCHURCH 15! 

what he thought of them, he answered "that 
they contained a good deal of carious matter, 
but the Greek was execrable." 

By Jelf hangs a tale. He was younger brother to 
the Canon, an accomplished scholar, author of a 
Greek Grammar which furnished to English students 
what Matthias had achieved for Germans. But his 
reputation rests upon the historic "Jelf row" of 
1843. Proctor in that year, he was the most 
unpopular official of the century, beating " Lincoln 
Green" and Merton Peters, who ranked next to 
him in odium. He seems to have found enjoyment 
in what Proctors usually hate, the punitive side 
of his duty. Dexterous in capturing, offensive 
in reprimanding, venomous in chastising his victims, 
he had accumulated against himself a fund of 
hatred which abode its time, until it might find 
relief in the Saturnalia of Commemoration. It 
happened that the uproar which ensued gave voice 
to a duplex querela ; hostilities were rampant in 
the area as well as in the gallery of the Theatre. 
The young lions of the Newmania, sore from 
Pusey's suspension and Isaac Williams' defeat, and 
led by Lewis of Jesus and Jack Morris of Exeter, 
chose to be furious at the presentation of a 
Unitarian, the American Minister Everett, for 
an honorary D.C.L. Early in the morning they 
called on the Vice-Chancellor, Wynter, President 
of St. John's, to protest. Wynter, serene, indif- 
ferent, handsome " St. John's Head on a charger " 
men called him as he went out for his daily ride 
urged that Mr. Everett conformed in England ; 
that honorary degrees had no reference to theo- 



152 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

logical opinion ; would not, in short, withdraw the 
distinguished heretic. So finding remonstrance 
vain, the angry malcontents attended in formidable 
numbers to non placet the degree. On the other 
hand, the smarting undergraduates had sworn a 
solemn oath, like John Barleycorn's royal foes, 
to stop all proceedings until Jelf was driven out 
of the Theatre. From his first appearance in the 
procession the yells and groans went on without a 
moment's slackening. In dumb show the Vice- 
Chancellor opened the Convocation, Garbett de- 
claimed inaudible his Creweian Oration, Bliss 
presented Everett, who, red-gowned, unconscious, 
smiling, took his seat among the Doctors. An 
opposing Latin speech by Marriott and a volley 
of non placets from his friends were imagined 
but unheard amid the din, and ignored by Wynter, 
who at the expiration of an hour dissolved the 
Convocation, to the fury of the Puseyites, the 
triumph of the gallery, and, so all believed, to 
his own concealed but genuine relief from a very 
difficult position. After-protests poured in upon 
him, to be met by bland assurances, which no 
one credited, but no one could disprove, that in the 
ceaseless uproar he had not heard the non placets ; 
that, in short, factum valuit, the thing was done. 
His well-known hostility to the High Churchmen 
added poignancy to their defeat : when soon after- 
wards he was succeeded as Vice-Chancellor by Ben 
Symons, one of them said " Solvitur acris Hyems 
Grata Vice" Three or four men were expelled ; 
amongst them Parnell, a Double First of Wynter's 
own College, who had not yet put on his gown, and 



CHRISTCHURCH 153 

who, according to the testimony of those who sat 
near him, was inconspicuous if not innocent in 
the turmoil ; while the posthumous indignation 
of the M.A.'s fizzled out in the appointment of 
a committee. "So," says the Introduction to a 
recent edition of " Eothen," " while Everett was 
obnoxious to the Puseyites, Jelf was obnoxious 
to the undergraduates ; the cannonade of the 
angry youngsters drowned the odium of the 
theological malcontents ; 

" Another lion gave another roar, 
And the first lion thought the last a bore." 

The Tractarian element in the tumult is described 
in a richly humorous letter to Lord Blachford 1 from 
Dean Church, himself prominent in the following 
year as interposing with Guillemard of Trinity to 
crush by their proctorial non placet the decree against 
"Tract 90": a dramatic incident which had not 
occurred during the entire century, except when 
in 1836 the measure to suspend Hampden was 
veto'd by Bayley of Pembroke and Reynolds of 
Jesus. I possess the address of thanks presented 
to Church and Guillemard, signed by about six 
hundred notable graduates, not by any means 
confined to the High Church party. 

The memory of Osborne Gordon is, I fear, 
already fading. The authors of the "Life of 
Stanley " think that " some few readers may have 
met with his Greek lines on Chantrey's children." 
I should hope every scholar can repeat them 
non obtusa adeo gestamus pectoral 2 Less known, 

1 " Life of Dean Church," p. 40. 2 Appendix J. 



154 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

and very scarce, are his " Sapphics on the Installa- 
tion of Lord Derby as Chancellor," a parody on 
Horace's " Quern Virum." x With solemn irony 
he glorifies his hero ; lauds him, in fiction such 
as Phoebus loves, a consistent Proteus, skilled to 
veil base thoughts in noble words ; recalls in a 
felicitous stanza his savage assault on smiling 
Bishop Wilberforce in the House of Lords ; sneers 
at the tail of followers brought with him to be 
decorated " sorry wreck of a defeated crew, to 
be refitted in the harbour of quiet Isis." Young 
men and maidens in the Theatre cheer him and 
them ; with malign smile the country looks and 
listens. I know not what fly had stung him 
what motive winged and pointed a shaft so keen ; 
it must have pierced the Chancellor's embroidered 
panoply, vulnerable to elegant academic taunts, 
though impervious to vernacular Parliamentary 
vituperation. 

One more skit let me be permitted to recall, 
emanating from the same College, partly from 
the same pen. In 1857 Dr. Acland went with 
Dean Liddell, then in delicate health, to Madeira. 
On his return voyage a large thunny was caught 
by the sailors, rescued when the ship was wrecked 
on the Dorsetshire coast, taken to Oxford by the 
Professor, articulated by Charles Robertson, and 
mounted in the Anatomy School. Brought thence 
to the new Museum in 1860, it was placed in the 
area, with a somewhat inflated Latin inscription 
on Thunnus quern vides affixed to its handsome 
case. Soon appeared a sham Congregation notice, 
1 Appendix K. 



CHRISTCHURCH 155 

announcing a statute for the abrogation of the 
label and substituting another, Thunnus quem rides, 
a line-upon-line travesty of the first; as derisively 
satirical as its model was affectedly complacent. 1 
It was believed to have been rough-hewn by Lewis 
Carroll^ handed round the Common Room, re- 
touched by Gordon, Bode, and Chaffers, who 
happened to be dining as Gordon's guest : a 
delightful change at the close, eo-KeXereufl?;, skele- 
tonised, to e^KLS/jLcopevdrj, Skidmoreised, Skidmore 
having constructed the supporting iron foliage of 
the area, was ascribed to Mr. Prout, who is still 
in green old age an admired ornament of "The 
House." Would that we had more of Osborne 
Gordon ! Marshall of Christchurch edited a 
volume of his sermons with an inadequate 
Memoir. Those who can still remember that 
queer, mocking face with its half-closed, in- 
scrutable eyes (he was known as " the debauched 
crow"), and who knew the humour, wisdom, be- 
nignity, which lay behind it, are fewer every 
day 

" Slowly we disarray ; our leaves grow few, 
Few on the tree, and many on the sod." 

He is a memory only, and will some day cease 
to be that. 

A recent diarist in a book of " Memoirs " calls 
his old tutor a vulgarian and a tuft-hunter. Pro- 
bably Gordon snubbed him, deservedly no doubt, 
but forgetting Shallow's advice to Davy, and this 
is his revenge; the valet-de-chambre was no hero. 

1 Appendix L. 



156 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

He was accused of obsequiousness to " Tufts." 
Polite to them he was, and they were fond of him. 
When one of them was sent down in disgrace, he 
passed Gordon as he left by Canterbury Gate. 
" Sorry to leave you, Mr. Gordon/' he said ; " I 
always enjoyed attending your lectures." "Did 
you really ? " was the answer, " I must say that you 
showed a great deal of self-denial." A conceited 
undergraduate said to him one day : " I am afraid, 
sir, that I have rather a contempt for Plato." " And 

/ am afraid, Mr. , that your contempt has not 

been bred by familiarity." 

I have mentioned Lewis Carroll. He was junior 
to these other men, and has been fully biogra- 
phised since his death. Of course, he was one of 
the sights of Oxford : strangers, lady strangers 
especially, begged their lionising friends to point 
out Mr. Dodgson, and were disappointed when 
they saw the homely figure and the grave, repellent 
face. Except to little girls, he was not an alluring 
personage. Austere, shy, precise, absorbed in 
mathematical reverie, watchfully tenacious of his 
dignity, stiffly conservative in political, theological, 
social theory, his life mapped out in squares like 
Alice's landscape, he struck discords in the frank 
harmonious College camaraderie. Away from 
Oxford, and especially in home life, I am told that 
he was cheery and would unbend himself. The 
irreconcilable dualism of his exceptional nature, 
incongruous blend of extravagant frolic with self- 
conscious puritan repression, is interesting as a 
psychological study now that he is gone, but cut 
him off while living from all except the " little 




CHRISTCHURCH 157 

misses" who were his chosen associates. His 
passion for them was universal and undiscrimi- 
nating ; like Miss Snevellici's papa, he loved them 
every one. Yet even here he was symmetrical 
and rigid ; reaching the point where brook and 
river meet, the petted loving child friend was 
dropped, abruptly, remorselessly, finally. Perhaps 
it was just as well : probably the severance was 
mutual ; the little maids put away childish things, 
he did not : to their maturer interests and grown- 
up day-dreams he could have made no response : 
better to cherish the recollection unimpaired than 
to blur it by later consciousness of unsuitability ; 
to think of him as they think of nursery books ; 
a pleasant memory, laid by upon their shelves 
affectionately, although no longer read. And to 
the few who loved him this faithlessness, as some 
have called it, seems to reveal the secret of his 
character. He was what German Novalis has 
called a "grown-up child." A man in intellectual 
range, severe self-knowledge, venturesome imagina- 
tion, he remained a child in frankness, innocence, 
simplicity; his pedantry cloaking a responsiveness 
which shrank from coarser, more conventional, 
adult contact, yet vibrated to the spiritual kinship 
of little ones, still radiant with the visionary 
light which most of us lose all too soon, but 
which shone on him through life. 



CHAPTER X 

MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 

" Lordly is Christchurch, with its walks and qiiadrangles ; 
lovely is Merton, as it were the sister of Christchurch, and 
gracefully dependent ; New College is majestic ; All Souls 
worthy of princes y but Magdalen alone is all that is the 
charm of others, compendious in itself ; yielding only a 
little to each rival in particular, but in the whole excelling 
them all." CLEVELAND COXE. 

The Most Beautiful of Colleges Dr. Routh His Old Young Wife 
His Mania for Books His Friends Some Famous Men of 
Magdalen New College Shuttleworth Whately and Manning 
The Abingdon Ball and the Brigands of Bagley Wood 
Public Orator Crowe Christopher Erie His Sharp Tongue 
Lancelot Lee One of the Detenus of 1803 Dr. Nares His 
Drollery written for Miss Horseman Warden Sewell. 

THE "College of the Lily" pairs naturally with its 
Mater Pulchra, New College. I knew Magdalen in 
the Thirties ; the rambling Greyhound Inn, with 
large glass-warehouse adjoining, on the site of the 
present schoolroom ; the trees, tall and umbrageous 
then as they are not to-day ; the choristers' play- 
ground, in front of which used to pace up and 
down the Usher, Lancaster of Queen's, who once 
enlivened a University sermon by speaking of 
Hampden as "that atrocious Professor." I recall 
the noble Inigo Jones gateway, removed early in 
the Forties in deference to the Puginesque craze 
which had just then set in ; Pugin's erection in its 

turn, prope funeratus arboris ictu, damaged by the 

158 




DR. ROUTH, PRESIDENT OF MAGDALEN 
From the Pickersgill Portrait, 1851 (?) 



MAC 

r~ii , 



MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 159 

fall of a vast elm branch, and looked upon as 
somewhat paltry by a succeeding generation, giving 
way after several experiments to the present un- 
satisfying entrance. 

Architecturally, Magdalen is to other Colleges 
what Oxford is to other towns and cities. Even 
at New College we miss the indescribable charm of 
its Hall and Chapel ; in its walks and grove we 
have, as nowhere else, the "hallowed haunt" of 
Milton and the " classic ground " of Addison. No 
other College pretends to match the felicitous 
grouping of its clustered buildings ; and its cam- 
panile dominating the whole is supreme among the 
third-pointed towers of all England. Nowhere else 
does the Numen inest so inspire and enthral. But 
its prime of rarity in those days was its President, 
Dr. Routh, "of olden worth the lonely leaf and 
last" ; who, born in 1754, was in the later Thirties 
past fourscore, and was to live into his hundredth 
year. It was as a spectacle that he excited popular 
interest; to see him shuffle into Chapel from his 
lodgings a Sunday crowd assembled. The wig, 
with trencher cap insecurely poised above it, the 
long cassock, ample gown, shorts and buckled 
shoes ; the bent form, pale venerable face, enor- 
mous pendent eyebrows, generic to antique por- 
traits in Bodleian gallery or College Halls, were 
here to be seen alive 

" Some statue you would swear 
Stepped from its pedestal to take the air." 

After 1836 he was rarely visible in the streets, but 
presided at College Examinations, and dined in 



160 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Hall on Gaudy days, occupying the large State 
Chair, never profaned by meaner loins, constructed 
from the immemorial Magdalen elm, which, much 
older than the College, fell with a terrific crash in 
1789. In front of his lodgings stood a scarcely 
less venerable acacia tree, split from the root ori- 
ginally, and divagating in three mighty stems, of 
late years carefully propped. Once while he was 
at Tylehurst, his country home, word was sent to 
him Ithat a heavy gale had blown his acacia tree 
down : he returned a peremptory message that it 
should be put up again. Put up it was ; the Mag- 
dalen Dryads owned their chief ; it lived, and long 
survived him. I stood for a Demyship early in the 
Forties ; nominated, according to the custom then 
prevalent, by Frank Faber. He was confined to 
his rooms by illness, and had failed to comply with 
some essential preliminary, of which he ought to 
have been informed. But so it was said the Vice- 
President, with the Fellow next in order, to whom 
Faber's nomination, if forfeited, would lapse, con- 
spired to keep it from the invalid ; and when he 
was carried into Hall to vote for me, they sprang 
the objection they had husbanded, and disqualified 
him. I went in for viva voce immediately after- 
wards, and I remember how old Routh, shaken by 
the contest, wept while I construed to him the lines 
from the Third Book of the " Iliad," in which 
Helen, from the walls of Troy, names the Grecian 
chiefs below. My supplanter was a Winchester boy 
named Wickham, who died shortly afterwards. 

Mrs. Routh was as noticeable as her husband. 
She was born in the year of his election to the 



MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 161 

Presidency, 1791; so that between "her dear man," 

as she called him, and herself "that crathy old 

woman," as he occasionally called her were nearly 

forty years. We are told that she three times asked 

him to marry her before he consented ; and some 

of his love verses are preserved, resembling, George 

Eliot would say, the cawings of an amorous rook. 

But she had become rapidly and prematurely old : 

with strongly marked features, a large moustache, 

and a profusion of grey hair, she paraded the streets, 

a spectral figure, in a little chaise drawn by a 

donkey and attended by a hunchbacked lad named 

Cox. "Woman," her husband used to proclaim, 

when from the luncheon table he saw Cox leading 

the donkey carriage round, "Woman, the ass is at 

the door." Meeting me as a boy, she sometimes 

used to take me in to lunch, where the old President, 

who was intimate with my father, talked to me 

good-naturedly, questioned me about my school 

work ; showed me one day the scar on his table 

which had been left by Dr. Parr's tobacco ; and 

enjoyed my admiration of the books which lined 

hall, rooms, staircase. He was proud of possessing 

many not on the Bodleian shelves. To himself 

and to Dr. Bandinel the London catalogues were 

regularly sent : Bandinel would mark off the 

treasures which he coveted and write by return of 

post, but was constantly informed that the books 

had gone to Dr. Routh. One day, calling at Tegg's 

shop, he saw the boy bring in a pile of catalogues 

wet from the press. Now is my time, he thought ; 

noted some sets of rare books, and said, " I will 

take these books away with me." The shopman 

L 



1 62 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

went to consult his chief. " I am very sorry, sir, 
but they are all bespoken by Dr. Routh." " How 
can that be ? Are not the catalogues freshly 
printed ? " " Yes, sir, but proofs of all our cata- 
logues are sent to Dr. Routh." Dr. Jacobson was 
another disappointed rival ; he obtained the proofs, 
but was still too late : remonstrating with the book- 
seller, he was told that while he wrote for the books 
he wanted, the President sent a man up by the 
early coach to secure and bring them back. The 
story gives delightful point to the generous caution 
which he is said to have impressed on Jacobson : 
" Beware, sir, of acquiring the habit of reading 
catalogues ; you will never get any good from it, 
and it will consume much of your time." 

Old Marshall Hacker, going through the papers 
of his uncle, W. A. Jenner, found a bundle of slips 
on which Jenner, a Fellow of Magdalen, had for 
years, after leaving Common Room in the evening, 
written down stories told, noteworthy observations 
and jokes, many of them from Routh's lips. Some 
were coarse ; and Marshall Hacker, without making 
any selection, burned the whole. Herostratus still 
walks amongst us. 

His especial friend was Dr. Bliss ; I have a 
letter to him from Routh, sealed with his favourite 
IX&T2 seal, deploring my father's death. Bliss 
once asked him to say, supposing our language* 
to become dead to-morrow, who would take the 
classic rank in English which Cicero had held in 
Latin. (t I think, sir, our friend Tom Warton," 
he replied ; an answer bespeaking no great know- 
ledge of older English Prose, In later years 



MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 163 

Burgon, fussy, obsequious, adulating, hovered 
about him. Henry Coxe, an accomplished mimic, 
used to render dialogues between the two, bringing 
out, as in the tl always verify quotations," and the 
recipe for theological study, the absurdity of which 
Burgon's narrative is all unconscious. He much 
admired ]. H. Newman, who dedicated to him his 
" Lectures on Romanism in 1837 " ; speaking of him 
always as " that clever young gentleman of Oriel." 
Having come to Oxford from his Suffolk home in 
1770, he was a mine of anecdote as to the remote past; 
had seen two undergraduates hanged for highway 
robbery on the gallows which ornamented the 
corner of Long Wall near Holywell Church the 
"church by the gallows" it is called in a skit 
from Anthony Wood's collection remembered 
stopping in High Street to gaze on Dr. Johnson 
as he rolled up the steps into University College. 
One of his aunts, he used to say, had known a 
lady who saw Charles I. in Oxford. He died, 
so John Rigaud averred, and so Blagrave, his 
>rother-in-law and man of] business admitted, 
through chagrin at the fall of Russian Securities, 
in which most of his hoards were invested, at the 
time of the Crimean War a very respectable 
way of breaking one's heart, according to Mr. 
Dombey, but which would have formed an anti- 
climax to Burgon's rhapsodies. Rigaud imitated his 
voice and manner with startling accuracy ; his stories 
of the old man owed their force to this, and would 
be pointless written down. Rigaud preserved too 
his queer shoes and gown, and one of his wigs; 
another was secured by Daubeny, who sent it to 



164 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

be petrified in the Knaresborough Spring. It 
would have been indestructible without this cal- 
cifying process : when in 1860 a grave was sunk 
in New College antechapel to receive the remains 
of Warden Williams, an ancient skeleton was 
found extended, the bones partly dissolved, the 
wig fresh as from the maker's hands. The old 
man's spectacles passed from Bloxam to Rigaud, 
and are now preserved by Dr. Macray of the 
Bodleian. 

Of the Magdalen Fellows in the Thirties I have 
mentioned Daubeny ; I recall also Chambers, riding 
from Swerford into Oxford in a broad-brimmed 
hat, followed by a pack of little dogs ; and Sibthorp, 
whose oscillation to and fro between the English 
and the Roman Church were viewed as comic 
rather than serious at a time when " 'verts " had 
not begun to come upon the stage. I recall Frank 
Faber, a kindly careless valetudinarian, lecturing 
in dressing-gown and slippers, his head sheltered 
by an umbrella from every gleam of sunshine. 
An old Fellow of the College used to relate that, 
riding once out of Oxford, and resting at Shilling- 
ford Inn, he was told that Mr. Faber was in the 
house. He went to his room, and found him 
sitting up in bed with an umbrella over his head. 
James Mozley's shy, cold outside hid a genial 
nature and a mind of rarest power. "Dick" 
Sewell was a frank Bohemian ; his vigorous New- 
digate on the "Temple of Vesta" was said to 
have been written in a single night. A barrister 
on the Western circuit, he used to get me leave 
out at Winchester, sending me to dine alone at 



MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 165 

his lodgings, where I found a roast fowl, a pint 
of champagne, a novel, and a tip. Henderson's 
First Class in 1839 was long memorable in the 
history of the Schools ; he became Headmaster 
successively of Hatfield Hall, Durham ; of Vic- 
toria College, Jersey ; and of Leeds Grammar 
School. He died, as Dean of Carlisle, in 1905. 
Charles Reade, just beginning to write novels, 
would beguile acquaintances into his ill-furnished 
rooms, and read to them ad nauseam from his 
latest MS. Bloxam, Newman's curate at Little- 
more, incarnation of all that was ideal in the 
College, its mediaevalism, sentiment, piety, was the 
first man to appear in Oxford wearing the long 
collarless coat, white stock, high waistcoat, which 
form nowadays the inartistic clerical uniform. 
Like his better known brother Matthew, he was 
a laborious antiquary, and compiled a Register 
of the Members of his College from its founda- 
tion. He established the delightful Christmas Eve 
entertainment in the College Hall which has been 
annual now for fifty-eight years. Held first in his 
own rooms as a treat to the choristers, then in the 
Summer Common Room, it came in 1849 to fill 
the Hall with a hundred guests or more. Hymns, 
carols, parts of the " Messiah," were sung through 
the evening ; the boys were feasted at the high 
table, the visitors waiting upon them, and eating 
Christmas frumenty. Then, when midnight drew 
near, a hush fell on the assembly, the choir 
gathered round the piano ; twelve o'clock pealed 
from the tower, and as the last stroke ceased to 
vibrate, Pergolesi's "Gloria" rose like a stream 




1 66 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

of rich distilled perfumes, and sent us home in 
tune for the worship as well as for the festivity 
of the Christmas Day. I am told that the gracious 
custom still abides, to keep fresh and green the 
memory of dear old Bloxam. Of the remaining 
Fellows I will say no more than that they were, 
for the most part, fruges consumere nati } born to eat 
their founder's venison and drink his wine ; and 
justified their birthright zealously. Two among 
them, Whorwood and T. H. Newman, claim a 
kindly though certainly not a reverential notice. 
Whorwood was the last and landless descendant 
of an ancient line, which had owned for centuries 
the wide manors of Shotover and Headington. 
His mother, "Madame Whorwood," a stately old 
lady in antique dress, lived with him in the house 
overhanging the Cherwell on the north side of 
Magdalen Bridge ; the top of her high cap usually 
visible to passers-by. They moved afterwards to 
a house in the High Street, over which her an- 
cestral hatchment was suspended when she died. 
He was a fresh-coloured, smooth-faced, vivacious, 
whist-playing, amiable lounger. Later in life he 
took the College living of Willoughby, leading 
there a lonely, melancholy life, cheated and ruled 
by five domestics, whose service was perfect free- 
dom. Dining once in his old College, he was 
boasting of their docility and devotion ; Rigaud 
scribbled and handed round his own rendering 
of the facts 

" Sunt mihi quinque domi servi, sunt quinque magistri ; 
Quod jubeo faciunt, quodque volunt jubeo ; " 



MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 167 

Englished promptly by Octavius Ogle into 

" Five servants I have whom I handsomely pay, 
Five masters I have whom I always obey. 
To do what I bid them they never refuse, 
For I bid them do nothing but just what they choose." 

Alas ! The human butterfly in its later stages 
is a sight more cautionary than pleasing ; I met 
poor Whorwood not long before his death, pallid, 
weary, corpulent ; and he cried as we talked over 
old times. Newman was a practical joker ; his 
rooms overlooked the river, and he sometimes 
fished out of his window. The men coming in 
from Cowley Marsh cricket and constitutionals 
were arrested one afternoon to see him struggling 
with a fish, which Sawell announced through a 
speaking trumpet from another window to be an 
enormous pike. Great was the concourse, pas- 
sionate the excitement, profuse the advice ; till at 
last the monster was hauled up, gaffed, and drawn 
in at the window. It was on view in his rooms 
ever after, ingeniously constructed of cardboard 
overlaid with tinfoil. He was not related to the 
future Cardinal ; but his initials, T. H. N., caused 
him often to be confounded with, and to receive 
letters intended for, his Oriel namesake, J. H. N. ; 
and their handwriting was curiously alike. An 
accomplished artist and connoisseur, he once, by 
borrowing the Cardinal's signature, gained access 
to Claude's Liber Veritatis at Chatsworth of 
course in the absence of the Duke, who would 
have detected him. On an earlier occasion, having 
undertaken to preach in the country, he secured 
by the false initials an immense congregation ; and 



1 68 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

delivered, as he used to tell the story, a sermon 
on the " Final Conflagration of all things/' which 
terrified some into fits. Opening one day a letter 
mis-sent to himself, he found it to be from a pious 
spinster, asking for a subscription, and requesting 
an autograph copy of some of J. H. N.'s beautiful 
verses, to be inserted in her album. He sent the 
following : 

"My name's T. H. Newman j 

And sorely grieved I am 
That, like an orphaned lamb, 
I haven't got a dam." 

From Magdalen I pass naturally to New College, 
whence it lineally sprang. Its Warden was Shuttle- 
worth, close friend and ally of the " Noetics," the 
only Head who in 1834 had courage to vote for 
the admission of Dissenters to the University ; 
author of a rather dull book on St. Paul's Epistles, 
but a wit, raconteur, caricaturist, mimic. When 
the queer cupola, extant and inexplicable still, 
was made to surmount the Theatre, he wrote to 
Whately " You ask for news : I have one item 
only : the Radcliffe has kittened, and they have 
perched one of the kittens on the top of the 
Sheldonian." He invented an inclined mahogany 
railroad, still in use, whereby decanters circula- 
ting at the horse-shoe tables in the Common Room 
could be carried automatically across the interval 
of the fire-place. A Winchester boy, he made his 
mark at school as a writer of burlesques ; two of 
his pieces, " Phaethon," and the " Progress of 
Learning," sent up in 1800 instead of, or together 
with, the serious poems expected, are preserved 




MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 169 

in the "Carmina Wiccamica." * Here are four 
lines from the first, where the steeds discover 
that Phaethon, not Phoebus, sits behind them 

" For Horses, Poets all agree, 
Have common sense as well as we ; 
Nay, Homer tells us they can speak 
Not only common sense, but Greek." 

The second opens with the boy leaving home 

" The fatal morn arrives, and oh ! 
To school the blubbering youth must go," 

carries him through school, college, country living, 
to a Deanery ; ends with the predictive lines 

" As erst to him, O heavenly Maid, 
Learning, to me impart thy aid ; 

teach my feet like his to stray 
Along Preferment's flowery way. 
And, if thy hallowed shrine before 

1 still thy ready aid implore, 

Make me, O Sphere-descended Queen, 
A Bishop, or, at least, a Dean." 

Episcopal aspirations do not always take shape at 
eighteen years old ; with Shuttleworth they seem 
to have been continuous ; Scott's Homerics satirise 
him thirty-four years later, as refraining from the 
Peel and Wellington contest, in order to maintain 
his expectation of a bishopric from the Whigs 

'A.vdpCjv 5' OVK TjyeiTO Trepi'/cXuros ' 
(TT7J 5' airavevdev ewv, 




A mitre he obtained in 1840, and died sixteen 
months after his elevation. On going down to his 
bishopric at Chichester, he was warned by Whately 
against Manning, an incumbent in his diocese, 
1 Appendix M. 



170 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

as an undoubted "Tractite" so Whately always 
called them. The Archdeaconry of Chichester 
was vacant, the appointment in the new Bishop's 
hands. He met Manning at a dinner-party, was 
impressed with his mien and talk, and they sat 
together afterwards in the drawing-room mutually 
charmed. Manning had walked from no great 
distance ; his parsonage lay in the Bishop's way 
home, and Shuttleworth offered him a seat in his 
carriage. Set down at his own door, " Good- 
night, my lord," said Manning ; Good-night, 
Mr. Archdeacon," said the Bishop. 

His Fellows at New College, as at Magdalen, 
were curiously unequal in merit and distinction. A 
very few, "the two good Duncans," Bandinel, Tre- 
menheere, Chief Justice Erie, Archdeacon Grant, 
George Cox, J. E. Sewell, afterwards Warden, 
William Heathcote, be of them that have left a 
name behind them ; the rest were mostly of very 
common clay indeed. Until 1838 the College had 
refused to undergo the public examination for 
degrees, and was further oppressed by the incubus 
of founder's kin, which imposed two superannuated 
dunces from Winchester every year, to the exclu- 
sion often of their meritorious seniors. Two cen- 
turies earlier the discrediting aphorism, "Golden 
scholars, silver bachelors, leaden masters," had been 
popularly applied to the College ; and in 1852 it had 
fallen so low that the undergraduates petitioned for 
out-college tutors, pleading the incompetence of the 
resident staff. A wild set were not only the juniors 
but the seniors far into the Thirties. More than 
one strange scandal I could recount, of a sort 




MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 171 

which, like Horace's gold, are best placed when 
unexhumed. But I can vouch for the following 
frolic. Some men were going to the Abingdon 
Ball ; and in the Common Room the conversation 
turned on a highway robbery recently perpetrated 
near Wheatley. The ball-goers talked valiantly of 
their own courage, contemptuously of brigand 
dangers; their fly was announced, and off they 
drove. Coming home they were stopped in a dark 
part of Bagley Wood by two masked men, one of 
whom held the horses' heads, while his mate pointed 
a pistol into the fly with the conventional highway- 
man's demand. Meekly our gallant travellers sur- 
rendered money, watches, jewellery. One pleaded 
for a ring which had belonged to his old mother ; 
the deceased lady was consigned to Tartarus, the 
ring was taken, and the marauders rode away. Great 
commiseration was shown to the victims when 
they told their tale, great activity displayed by the 
police ; until, on going into Hall the next afternoon, 
they saw lying in a heap on the centre of the 
high table the abstracted valuables, including the 
maternal ring, while mounting guard over them 
was a broken candlestick which had done duty as 
a pistol. The two practical jokers had ridden to 
the wood, tied their horses to the trees, waited for 
the revellers, and played the wild Prince and Poins. 
A few more men of note I remember, rari nantes 
in gurgite. Public Orator Crowe had lately passed 
away, farmer-like, uncouth, wearing a long cassock 
to hide his leather breeches, but a fine Latinist with 
a magniloquent delivery which found scope each 
year at the Encaenia. The neat Latin inscription 



172 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

on Warden Gauntlett's monument in the antechapel 
was his ; I possess the first draft in his handwriting, 
endorsed by Routh, to whom he had submitted it. 
He was known to the outer world by his really fine 
poem, " Lewesdon Hill " ; I remember " Mad " 
Hoskins, the squire of North Perrott, an enthusiastic 
Wykehamist, repeating the whole of it as we rode 
together, in 1846, within sight of that " proud 
rising." His father was a humble carpenter at 
Winchester ; the son, grown eminent, was standing 
by the west door of the Cathedral in conversation 
with the Dean and Warden, when the father, in 
working dress, his rule projecting from his cor- 
duroys, came by, and walked aside from the group 
in modest avoidance of recognition. Crowe saw 
him, and called after him in Hampshire Doric, 
" Here, fayther, if thee baint ashamed of I, I baint 
ashamed of thee." 

Another eccentric of the Thirties, Christopher 
Erie, brother to the Chief Justice, lived till long 
afterwards. Like most old-fashioned scholars of 
an era when philology was not, he knew his Greek 
and Latin books by heart, pouring out apt quota- 
tions with the broad a which then marked 
Wykehamists ; was a proficient, too, in Italian, 
French, and English literature, with his Dante at 
his fingers' ends. He was a familiar figure at the 
Athenaeum, where one day his Bishop, newly 
appointed Sam of Oxford, remonstrated with him 
very impertinently, since they were on neutral 
ground for wearing a black neckcloth. Erie 
called the club porter. " Porter, do you know 
this gentleman ? This is the Bishop of Oxford. 



MAG 



MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 173 

Get me half-a-dozen white ties, and bring me one 
whenever this gentleman comes into the club." 
His living was in the part of Buckinghamshire 
colonised by Rothschilds Jerusalem the Golden it 
was called and the reigning Baron was his squire. 
It was Erie's whim to dress carelessly; and the 
plutocrat; walking one day with a large party and 
meeting his Rector in the parish, had the bad taste 
to handle his sleeve and say, " Rather a shabby 
coat, parson, isn't it?" Erie held it up to him 
"Will you buysh ? will you buysh ? " There 
ensued an exitus Israel, and Erie walked on chuck- 
ling and victorious. 

Of the same standing, and not less an original, 
was Lancelot Lee, who, with imposing face and 
figure, strident voice, assumed ferocity of manner, 
was a frequent visitor at my father's. He was one 
of the Detenus, Englishmen seized by Napoleon 
in 1803, and incarcerated till his fall in iSi^.. 1 
They were about ten thousand in number, some 
previously residents in France, but chiefly visitors 
or tourists. They included noblemen and gentle- 
men, clergymen and academics with their servants, 
workmen, and commercial travellers. All were 
at first treated as prisoners of war; but this 
sentence was afterwards limited to English officers, 
the rest were made prisoners on parole, and lodged 
in certain fortified towns. Those of higher rank, 
Lee amongst them, were confined at Verdun, under 
the charge of a ruffianly General Wirion, who 
treated them with insolent barbarity. A committee 
of nine gentlemen was formed to represent the 
1 Page 24. 



174 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

prisoners and assist the poorer captives, and of 
this committee Lee was one. Liberated at the 
peace, he returned to New College, and was 
presented to the valuable living of Wootton, 
near Woodstock, where he built an exceedingly 
handsome parsonage, and ruled his people as a 
kindly despot, his memory lingering among them 
affectionately long after his death. Coming out 
of church one day, he found two disreputable 
vagabonds in the churchyard. " What are you 
doing here ? " " Oh, sir, we are seeking the 
Lord." " Seeking the Lord, are you ? Do you 
see those stocks ? That is where the Lord will 
find you, if you stay here another minute." They 
did not stay. Insulted in his old age by a hulking 
ruffian, the terror of the village, he gave him a 
tremendous box on the ear ; and the bully, who 
could easily have thrashed him, slunk off cowed. 
The degree examination at New College was a 
farce, and roused his never-failing indignation. 
Traditions still survive of his furious protests, and 
Warden Gauntlett's placid insensibility, at each 
repetition of the sham. It would seem, however, 
that he was moved by moral disgust rather than 
by intellectual ardour. Old William Risley, of 
Deddington, used to relate that he was sitting in 
Lee's rooms one day when an undergraduate came 
in with a puzzling equation and a request for 
help. "Turn over to the next page, sir." "I have 
done so, sir." "Then turn over to the next" 
adding aside to Risley as the discomfited inquirer 

shut the door, tl I hate your d d clever fellows." 

He went once with Henry Williams, most cere- 



MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 175 

monious and correct of men, to call on Miss 
Horseman, the delightful old vestal earlier men- 
tioned. She was out. "Who shall I say called, 
sir ? " " Tell her," in a voice which sounded from 
the High to Canterbury gate, "Tell her it was 
the man she ought to have married ! " He died 
a bachelor in 1841. 

Miss Horseman's name suggests another well- 
known figure of the Thirties, old Dr. Nares, 
Professor of Modern History. As a handsome 
young Fellow of Merton, long before, he had 
acted in private theatricals at Blenheim, and eloped 
with Lady Charlotte Spencer Churchill. He was 
believed to be the author of an amusing book, 
" Thinks I to Myself," which lay on Miss Horse- 
man's table, but it was also attributed to his 
grandfather, the Rev. Henry Coles. The old lady 
and the Professor were fast friends, and she used 
to repeat to me a piece of clever jargon which 
he once extemporised to test the power of some 
bragging memorist. The closing sentence dove- 
tails into Foote's similar improvisation of the 
Piccalillies and the Great Panjandrum, 1 the con- 
fusion probably due to her ; 'the earlier part was, 
I believe, quite new. I learned it from the old 
lady's lips, and have retained it unwritten all 
these years in the receptacle which held Count 
Smorltork's materials for his great work on 
England : 

" There was a shovel, and a shackfok, and a one-eyed pikestaff, 
went to rob a rich poor man of the head of a herring, the brains 
of a sprat, and a bushel of barley meal. So he got up in 

1 Appendix N. 



1 76 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

the morning. 'Wife, we're robbed/ says he. 'You lie,' says 
she. ' Tis true,' says he ; ' we must saddle the brown hen and 
bridle the black staff.' So off they rode till they came to a 
long wide short narrow lane, and there they met three horse- 
nails bleeding at both nostrils. So they sent for the Hickmaid 
of the Hall ; she, being a rare stinter of blood, sent them word 
that Mrs. Jones Tittymouse Tattymouse was brought to bed of 
a mustard spoon and was very ill, and so she couldn't come. 
So they sent the boy to Mr. Macklin's, at the corner of St. 
Martin's Lane, for some plums to make an apple pudding with, 
but desired they mightn't be wrapped in brown paper, since the 
last tasted so of cabbage leaves they couldn't eat them. So 
the baker's boy came in to buy a penny loaf ; there being none, 
they gave him a farthing candle to eat. Presently three bears 
came by, and one popped its head in, and said, ' What, bless 
me, no soap ! ' So the head fell off the block, and beat the 
powder out of the Lord Chancellor's wig ; and he died, and she 
married the barber ; and that's the way that Mrs. Atkins came 
to lose her apple dumpling." 

Ex humili potens might be the motto of New 
College to-day ; its last fifty-seven years exhibit 
a resurrection as surprising from as profound a 
depth as is figured in the second part of " Faust." 
In 1850 the College, with its magnificent equip- 
ment, large revenues, scholarly Warden, and 
distinguished past, had become a hive of drones ; 
its residents few, its mode of life luxurious and 
expensive, its teaching bald and scanty. Now, in 
numbers and repute, in the Schools and on the river, 
New College ranks among the very highest Colleges. 
Transformation began with the Parliamentary 
Commission of 1854. It struck off antiquated 
chains, abolished the too close connection with 
Winchester, and the mischievous anachronism of 
founder's kin, increased the number and emoluments 
of the scholars. The younger men, growing each 



MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 177 

year in numbers and importance, and imbued with 
liberal ideas, carried successive reforms in spite of 
obstruction from their mediaeval seniors. The 
Warden, Sewell, elected in 1860 on the death of 
Dr. Williams, was conservative by instinct and by 
habit, with the maxim u qnieta non movere" ever 
on his lips. His distaste for the reform was patent, 
but his respect for the reformers who engineered 
it was unbounded ; reconciled to the measures 
by the men, he brought 'caution and sagacity to 
their assistance. He had his reward, not only in 
their respect and gratitude, but in the happiness 
which his new position ministered to a very 
unusual temperament. " Business," a term incar- 
nated more often than defined, was the breath of 
his nostrils : to write and answer letters in his 
beautiful copperplate hand, to sort and docket 
papers, chronicle collegiate ephemera, draw up 
reports, supervise and check accounts all that men 
are wont to find tedious and remit to secretaries 
formed his being's end and aim. If life-tasks 
such as these are not heroic in themselves, yet, 
discharged faithfully and well, they make possible 
the pageantry of life for others : and the destiny 
which selected him, an unambitious man, to rule 
an ambitious College, exalted his peculiar gifts, 
though abstractedly commonplace and ordinary, 
to become essential factors in a great creation. 

And if his life was happy, so also his death 
was enviable. In expecting his approaching re- 
tirement, we all dreaded for him the disruption of his 
daily work, his exit from the dull back study in 
which he had laboured through two-and-forty years, 

M " 



REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

from the College in which through f our-and-seventy 
years he was said to have kept every term. He 
passed away in sleep, the sights and sounds which 
had made the enjoyment of his life present to 
him in his latest waking hours. lt In such a death," 
says Cicero in the daintiest of his treatises, " in such 
a death there is neither pain nor bitterness ; but 
as ripe fruit is lightly and without violence loosened 
from its branch, so the soul of such departs 
ungrieving from the body wherein its life's expe- 
rience hath lain." 



CHAPTER XI 
ORIEL 

" Sumnii enim stmt homines tantum" 

QUINTILIAN. 

Newman His Character and Career Had Arnold been at Oxford 
in his Time ! Vain Speculations Newman's Life as a Catholic 
Hawkins Charles Marriott Eden The Efficacy of the 
Bible George Anthony Denison Tom Hughes A " Christian 
Chartist" His Radicalism "Tom Brown" Oxford in Fiction 
Charles Neate and John Bright Neate, Disraeli, and the 
Angels. 

A HUNDRED yards from Miss Horseman's door 
stands Oriel gateway. What a procession of 
phantoms meets the inward eye as I approach it ! 
White-haired Provost Hawkins, Newman, Frederick 
Rogers, Charles Marriott, Eden, Denison, " Donkey" 
Litton, Low Church leader, inconspicuous in spite 
of his Double First, of his recognised ability and 
his two powerful volumes on " Dogmatic Theology/' 
Charles Neate, the only layman of the group, 
mounting his horse to join the Berkshire hounds. 
I was living at Iffley during Newman's golden 
time ; knew his mother in her pretty home at 
Rosebank, turned afterwards into a den of dis- 
orderly pupils by poor James Rumsey. I re- 
member the rising of Littlemore church, first among 

the new Gothic edifices which the "Movement" 

179 



i8o REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

revived in England ; met Newman almost daily 
striding along the Oxford Road, with large head, 
prominent nose, tortoiseshell spectacles, emaciated 
but ruddy face, spare figure whose leanness was 
exaggerated by the close-fitting tail-coat then worn. 
The road ceased to know him after a time ; he had 
resigned St. Mary's, and was monachising with a 
few devotees in his barn-like Littlemore retreat ; 
then, in 1845, Oxford lost him finally 

" Interque mserentes amicos 
Egregius properabat exul ; " 

to the anguish of his disciples left alone, who had 
made him their pattern to live and to die ; to the 
relief of many more, who thought that Humanism 
and Science might reassert themselves as subject 
matter of education against the polemic which had 
for fifteen years forced Oxford back into the barren 
word-war of the seventeenth century. By no 
means a recluse like Pusey, but gregarious, hospi- 
table, seminarising, he was always surrounded by 
disciples, in his rooms, in Oriel Common Room, in 
his Littlemore ccenobitium. But he would only 
associate with like-minded men ; lived, says, Isaac 
Williams, with persons younger than himself, who 
would reflect his own opinions ; shrank from 
healthy friction with avowedly opposed beliefs, broke 
off relations with his rationalist brother Francis, 
refused to see Manning, who came out to call on 
him at Littlemore, in consequence of a sermon he 
had preached upon the Gunpowder Plot. And so 
he was not, and is not, in any sense a mystery. 
While the cryptic element in Pusey's character is 



ORIEL 181 

deepened by the sacrilegious half-revelations of his 
biographers, Newman's own " Apologia " and the 
numerous tributes of his friends have shed a flood 
of fierce light upon his character. If Mozley's 
notices of the " Movement " are inaccurate and 
flippant, Pattison's vindictive, Palmer's tedious, 
Williams's jejune, Denison's irrelevant, we yet learn 
something of him from them all ; while the entire 
moral and intellectual epiphanies both of the 
" Movement " and the man are portrayed severally 
by Church and Ward. 

Surveying him calmly by the light of these^ 
now that his great name and his enthralling 
presence have become a memory, reading too the 
expositions of himself which flowed so rapidly 
from his pen during ten momentous years, we 
seem to conceive the secret at once of his ascend- 
ancy and his shipwreck. It was unfortunate for 
himself and others that he should have reigned 
without a rival ; his only opponents on the spot, 
Faussett, Golightly, and the rest, men impares con- 
gressi. The magic of his personality, the rhetorical 
sweetness of his sermons he used to say that 
he read through Mansfield Park every year, in 
order to perfect and preserve his style their 
dialectic vigour, championship of implicit faith as 
against evidential reasoning, contagious radiance 
of intense conviction, far more than the compel- 
ling suasion of his arguments and theories, drew 
all men after him. Had there been in Oxford at 
the time a commanding representative of liberal 
theology, with corresponding personal attractive- 
ness, seducing piety, intellectual equipment, argu-i 



1 82 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

mentative ability and promptitude ; had, for in- 
stance, Arnold been resident through those years 
at Oriel, not at Rugby, two camps instead of one 
would have been formed, Delphi would have 
been answered by Dodona ; Lake would not have 
been overpowered, Stanley shaken, less by the 
convincing proofs than by the unconfronted 
monocracy of the magnificent system which en- 
veloped them ; free play would have been proffered 
to the many minds which came regretfully to 
avow in later life that Newman exercised a dis- 
turbing, not a quickening, influence on their 
mental and religious growth. Nay, who can tell 
what consequences might not have issued from 
the immediate and continued contact of the two 
great gladiators themselves ; how many diver- 
gences might have been reconciled by the mutual 
respect and the recognition of fundamental com- 
munity which close collision must have produced 
on two so noble natures, the hurricane of opposing 
passion hushed by the still small voice of sym- 
pathy which vibrates between all good men. 
Both had their disabilities ; both lacked prescience, 
viewing the present with a short-sighted intensity 
which could not look ahead : if Arnold's consti- 
tutional deficiency was unguardedness and exag- 
geration, Newman's was impatience and despair. 
We see his limitations clearly now ; of temper, 
knowledge, mental discipline. We see haste to 
be despondent in the hero of his valedictory novel, 
more nakedly in his letters to his sister, until 
criticism is disarmed by their agony as the crisis 
^becomes inevitable.! That his secular knowledge 




JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 

From a pen-and-ink drawing, 1841 
Photographed from the Print by Mrs. Frieda Girdlestone 




ORIEL 183 

was limited all his reviews and essays show ; 
ignorant of German as we know him to have 
been, the historic development of religious reason 
with its underlying unity of thought lay outside 
the narrow philosophical basis on which were 
reared his Anglican conclusions ; while Arnold 
was just the man, invicem prcebens crura sagittis, 
to elucidate, correct, counterbalance, these flaws 
in his temperament and system. And if will 
governed and narrowed his intellect, so did im- 
patience dominate his piety and self-discipline. 
Austere in his ideal of Christian life as detached, 
ascetic, painful, he saw true discipleship only in 
organised and formal self-surrender, such as he 
found in the " regulars" of the Roman Church, 
but missed in English Protestantism. A convic- 
tion of his own infallibility underlies his whole 
mental current ; at every succeeding stage securus 
judicat, non-acceptance of his views is censurable 
in individual opponents, theologically disqualifying 
to their collective " note of Catholicity." How far 
years might aid his aspiration, his dreams pass 
into realities, his tests of Churchmanship find 
fulfilment in Anglican practice, he would not 
wait to see. For Teutonic slowness of appre- 
hension he made no allowance, confused the 
dominant instinct of startled contemporaries with 
the mature resultant of education and of time. 
" Had he lived to-day," said to me his old friend 
Hinds Howell, who passed away but now, "had 
he lived to-day, he would not have deserted his 
Church." Had Heads and Bishops tolerated 
" Tract 90" then, he might have died a Bishop 



1 84 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

or a Head ; but, as Matthew Arnold sang of 
Clough, "he could not wait their passing." 

These are matters of speculation ; but it is 
curious to note how, as a fact, from the moment 
of his secession his commanding influence ceased. 
The movement to which he had given birth 
continued as we know, goes on to-day as a de- 
generated mechanical survival ; that it should have 
outlived its unique leader is the strongest tribute 
to his creative force. On the Monday morning 
when he left Manuel Johnson's house for Oscott, 
he died to his old associates, to the University, 
to the public. He died to his old associates : 
Richmond's water-colour portrait of him leant 
against Pusey's bookshelves ; his marble bust, 
covered with a veil whether from dust or from 
reminiscences I never dared to ask stood in 
Keble's study ; but the three who had been as 
one in spiritual kinship met only, after many 
years, to find in an evening of restrained and 
painful converse that the topics uppermost in the 
minds of all were topics all must avoid, walking 
in the house of God as adversaries, not as friends. 
He died to the University : intellectual and edu- 
cational changes pursued one another like surging 
waves in Oxford; but the man who for fifteen 
years had to all Europe personated Oxford stood 
aloof from all, unconsulted, uninterposing, because 
he had fallen into the pit himself had digged, in 
narrowing the University from its great national, 
nay worldwide, function to the limits of a divinity 
school, so that, an alien in this one particular, 
he became an alien in all. And as from his 



ORIEL 



185 



brethren and from his University, so from the 
public he stood separate. The days of a Richelieu 
or an Alberoni are for ever past ; but that a 
Roman Cardinal may popularise and exalt his 
Church while he endears himself by doing battle 
in English public life, as a partisan of moral re- 
form, a pleader for social righteousness, a cham- 
pion of the oppressed and poor against individual 
and class rapacity, was shown in a series of 
splendid object lessons by his fellow prelate, a 
man less great, less single-minded, incomparably less 
sincere, but more constitutionally altruistic, more 
observant of the outer world in which he lived. 
Once only in the forty years did Newman win 
an audience ranging beyond controversialists and 
divines, in his famous " Apologia," which will go 
down, with Blanco White's " Autobiography," 
Froude's " Nemesis of Faith," and the "Phases 
of Faith" of his own brother Francis, as graphic 
self-dissections by men at once acutely and 
intensely organised of their innermost mental 
struggles amid distracting spiritual perplexities. 

To what task, then, in all these years did New- 
man's powerful and once restless intellect address 
itself ? No longer to proselytism, to Biblical criti- 
cism, to ecclesiastical reform ; he gave to old 
Anglican friends who sought him out, he gave to 
Denison in 1879, as to Stanley in 1864, the impression 
of a tragic sadness, of a " wasted life," of fearful- 
ness in the presence of advancing religious thought 
and speculation, of faded ability to handle questions 
with which formerly he was the first to grapple, of 
the piteously recurring cry when looking beyond 



1 86 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

the bars of his Oratory cage, " O, my mother ! 
Why dost thou leave me all day idle in the market 
place?" 1 He bent himself, as far as we can see, 
to the subjective task of dealing with his own soul, 
working out harmony in his inner nature, gaining 
certainty as to his relation towards the Unseen, 
security as to his future acceptance in the indistinct 
domain which held dead Gerontius expectant 
on his bed of sorrow. He has long since solved 
the riddle. Yet, let us admit that his was not the 
highest aim. The salvation of our own souls, 
the abstraction of our own natures, is at best a 
Buddha view of life and of eternity : the con- 
sumption of self in active work for others, the 
disregard of self mounting into Apostolic readiness 
to be "accursed for our brethren's sake," is the 
lesson of the life of Christ. Deep respect is due 
to the man who flung away friends, position, 
influence, in loyalty to the claim of conscience ; 
deep sympathy with saintliness is an ingredient 
in all highly strung spiritual natures ; but our age 
more than any calls for a sword rather than 
a prayer-carpet, a knight-errant rather than an 
ascetic ; a Shaftesbury, a Damien, a Dolling; 
rather than a Simeon Stylites battering the gates 
of heaven, however high his pillar, however rapt 
his insight, however vast his prospect, 
i Oriel reached its highest eminence under Pro- 
vosts Eveleigh and Copleston ; its decline began 
with Hawkins. In 1831 he dismissed his three 
great tutors, Newman, Robert Wilberforce, Froude 

1 " Life of Dean Stanley," ii. 342, 



ORIEL 



187 



whose conception of their duty to undergraduates ' 
threatened to establish brothers near the throne. 
Mark Pattison, an Oriel undergraduate at the time, 
and Dean Lake, surveying his own past university 
life, agreed in attributing to Hawkins the dethrone- 
ment of Oriel from its supremacy among Oxford 
Colleges. Yet he was no mere fussy despot : 
Newman in his " Apologia " has told us how much 
he owed to him : " He taught me to weigh my words 
and be cautious in my statements ; he led me to 
that mode of limiting and clearing my sense in dis- 
cussion and controversy which to my surprise has 
since been considered to savour of the polemic of 
Rome." That he should have been preferred above 
Keble for the Headship testifies his extraordinaryj 
reputation in the College. He piqued himself on 
his attitude towards the undergraduates ; took 
pains to know them individually, interviewed 
each freshman privately before admitting him to 
the Communion, would mitigate in Collections the 
wrath expressed against some weak brother by his 
tutor. One offence he could not overlook ; you 
might hope for leniency in minor peccadilloes, 
but you must not smell of smoke. I fear that the 
youthful temperament is more alive to eccentricities 
than to kindness ; the anecdotes which reach me 
from old Orielites of long ago illustrate chiefly the 
comic side of Hawkins' rule. He used to give one 
finger to a Commoner, the whole hand to a Tuft ; 
and was somewhat embarrassed when a certain man 

went down at the end of Term as Mr. and 

returned as Lord of . An Oriel under- 
graduate took to preaching in St. Ebbe's slums. 



1 88 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Hawkins angrily inhibited him. "But, sir, if the 
Lord, who commanded me to preach, came sud- 
denly to judgment now, what should I do ? " tl I," 
said Hawkins, " will take the whole responsibility of 
that upon myself." A man begged leave to absent 
himself in order to bury his uncle. ''You may 
go," was the reluctant permission, "but I wish it 
had been a nearer relation." In his high and dry 
churchmanship he was impartially bitter. Of the 
Newmania he always spoke in his exegetical ser- 
mons as "the late unhappy movement." When 
Irving's son obtained a First Class as Scholar of 
Balliol, and wished to stand for an Oriel Fellow- 
ship, the Provost refused to receive his name unless 
he would formally recant his father's opinions. 
When Jowett was bitten by a Balliol dog, and the 
quadruped was expelled from the College, the joke 
went round the University that Hawkins had re- 
ceived and tenderly entertained it. He was monarch 
of the old Hebdomadal Board, and was amazed 
when Lake, as Senior Proctor, had the temerity to 
oppose him. I remember his declaiming once in 
Congregation on the "very arduous duties of a 
College Head." Thorold Rogers got up and de- 
clared that while he did not exactly know what 
the Provost's duties were, he would be happy to 
discharge them for half the Provost's salary. Said 
Moral Philosophy Wilson, who was sitting by me : 
" It is the right thing to say, but it wanted a brigand 
to say it." His mind lacked largeness : a master of 
detail he was deficient in grasp, and lived amongst 
minutiae till his accuracy became pettiness, his 
conscientiousness scrupulosity, his over exactness 



ORIEL 189 

destructive of sentiment and warmth. His char- 
acter was summarised by Charles Neate : 

" His est Prepositus, 
Cunctis oppositus ; 
Qui magna gerit, 
Et tempus terit, 
Dum parva quserit. 
Vir reverendus 
Sed diligendus." 

Of the minora sidera which revolved round New- 
man, Charles Marriott, fyCkaira'Tos t flp*fo* v , was 
the most notable. Saving every penny for chari- 
table uses, he dressed like a beggar, with a veil 
over his weak eyes in summer and a dark green 
shade in winter, draped in a cloak made of two old 
M.A. gowns unequally yoked together. He often 
took me for walks, premising always that he had 
no small talk, and that I must not be offended if 
he were silent ; but it was easy to draw him out, 
and he would discourse with a kind of dry enthu- 
siasm on some of his philanthropic schemes 
economic, social, educational. He contributed 
several hundred pounds to a co-operative en- 
terprise, called the " Universal Purveyor." The 
project was commercially sound, but engineered 
by a sleek French scoundrel, who went off with 
all poor Marriott's money. I met this adven- 
turer once in his rooms at breakfast ; the 
beast gave his host at parting what he called a 
" Christian kiss " on either cheek. He turned out 
to be a spy in the pay of Louis Napoleon. I saw 
Marriott in his last illness, visiting him at Bon- 
church, with R. F. Wilson, Keble's curate at Amp 



190 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

field, Newman's friend and correspondent. As I 
entered his room he eagerly greeted me, and asked 
me to tell him the cube root of i. His brother 
John hushed him with a "dear Charles," and he 
became silent, with that queer tightening of the 
jaw which some of us remember well. But his 
half-paralysed brain was still active and his sense 
of fun acute. A new lodging house, ugly, com- 
fortless, uninviting, had been built close by ; the 
owner asked John Marriott what he should call 
it. Charles suggested the Redan it was the time 
of our repulse before Sebastopol " because it 
would never be taken." 

Marriott inherited Newman's rooms, Eden suc- 
ceeded to his parish. Burgon says of Eden that 
he strained his friends' affection by conceit and 
arrogance, meaning probably that he now and 
then rapped Burgon's knuckles, a feat which might 
cover a multitude of sins. To my recollection he 
was supremely agreeable in society. A dinner- 
party would be assembled in some stiff Head's or 
Professor's house, no convivial water for the feet 
or ointment for the head of entering guests, Dons 
and Donnas dull and silent in the drawing-room 
like Wordsworth's party in a parlour ; when Eden 
was announced. In he would dart, his droll hare- 
lipped face radiant with reaction from a hard 
morning's work and with generous prandial ex- 
pectancy ; would snatch a book from the table or 
an ornament from the shelf, as text for a vagrant 
cheery disquisition taking in all the solemn mutes in 
turn, till a general thaw set in, and we went down 
to a successful dinner. His manner in church was 



ORIEL 191 

quaint ; the matter of his sermons terse and 
scholar-like, but the manuscript held close to the 
candle and read without pretence of oratory, the 
voice coming and going in fitful gusts now forte 
now piano. He could not stand coughers : " if 
worshippers cannot restrain their coughs, they 
would better go out," he used to say in eager, 
snapping tones. He had a great horror, too, of 
casual lookers-in, migrants, who taste successive 
churches in turn; " Rovers never grow" was his 
frequent dictum. He had a theory that the letter 
of the Bible carried sacramental efficacy, that 
merely to read it to a worldling or a reprobate 
would drive out devils and sow germinating seeds. 
He tried it once on poor old Miss Horseman, who 
was in his parish and supposed to be near her end. 
She told me that he walked into her drawing-room, 
said no word, took down and opened her big 
Bible, read it to her for half-an-hour, and again 
without farewell departed. He, of course, suc- 
ceeded only in alarming and disturbing her ; to a 
chapter of the Bible she had no objection, but 
her formal old-fashioned breeding was outraged 
by his unceremonious aggression. When he left 
St. Mary's for the College living of Aberford, a 
large congregation came to hear his farewell ser- 
mon, prepared for an affecting and larmoyant vale- 
diction. He preached on some ordinary topic; 
then shut up his sermon case with a slap : " The 
volume of the book of my ministry among you 
is closed. It is sealed up and will be opened 
at the Judgment Day." 

Of George Anthony Denison picturesque and 



192 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

exasperating, eccentric and impracticable, stormy 
petrel in every row, at Oxford as at Eton, during 
sixty years ; restlessly pugnacious as a divine, dis- 
appointingly irrelevant as a writer ; like Sydney 
Smith in his estimate of the Church as a social 
bulwark, like Newman in his assumption of her 
historic and spiritual claims I have a word or two 
to say. He was the best of Hawkins' Tutors ; but 
Mark Pattison, who attended his lectures, speaks 
of him as deficient in illuminative and stimulating 
force, gathering all his erudition from the printed 
notes to the text-book read. And as in scholarship 
so in theology he was far below the giants of the 
" Movement " ; he had neither Newman's fascina- 
tion of moral earnestness and literary style, nor 
Liddon's later doctrinal enthusiasm, nor Pusey's 
fathomless abyss of learning ; he had not even 
Henry of Exeter's versatile facility in getting up a 
case and working it with a forensic adroitness 
which only the initiated could expose. His force 
was purely gladiatorial, his motive power personal ; 
the side he had adopted, the position he had taken 
up, became in his eyes sacramental, opposition to it 
criminal and blasphemous. When, in 1863, Pusey 
proposed a compromise to end the Jowett strife, 
Denison gathered the country clergy in defiance of 
his old chief, ascending the steps of the semicircle 
in the Theatre in order to expound to us in Latin 
the causes " quia discedo ab amicis mets." I re- 
member the roar of displeasure which cut him 
short, the scream of " Procacissimi pueri" with 
which he descended, the curious subsequent mis- 
take, when Chambers, the Proctor, announced the 



ORIEL 193 

result of the voting by li Majori parti placet" ; then, 
blushing and confused, gave way to his fellow 
Proctor, Kitchin, who dashed the exultation of 
Jowett's friends by the amended proclamation, 
" Majori parti non placet." His sermons were mina- 
ciously dogmatic, alienating to large-minded and 
thoughtful men, grateful only to the prepossession 
which prefers petulant insistence to sweet reason- 
ableness in argument and appeal. He ruled his 
clergy in Somersetshire imperiously ; I always felt 
sorry for his Bishop. The only man among them 
who could stand up to him was Clark, the Vicar of 
Taunton, a man of temperament much akin to his 
Archdeacon's, but apt to disregard the convenances 
of gentle breeding which in all his outbreaks 
governed Denison. Agreeable in society he 
always was ; it was Stanley's delight to place him 
at the Deanery table among men whom he had 
just been traducing in the Jerusalem Chamber, and 
who found their malignant censor transformed 
into a cheery equal, friendly, anecdotic, convivial. 
"There are men," he would say to you, as, after 
vilipending you all the morning, he asked you to take 
wine with him at luncheon, " there are men whose 
persons I love and whose opinions I abhor, and 
there are men whose opinions I honour and whose 
selves I hate." And this quality redeemed him ; 
without it he would have been a mere firebrand 
to some he seemed so all along ; but those who saw 
him in his softer hour and many such remain 
those especially who watched him presiding over 
his parish water storage and harvest home fes- 
tivities, still send from the railway windows as 

N 



194 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

they shoot past Brent Knoll a benediction, half 
humorous, half affectionate ; echo regretfully the 
Tanden requiescit of Lord Lyttelton's burlesque 
epitaph. 1 {t Requiescat," they will add, " but not 
in pace; peace would destroy his paradise ! " 

Associated ever in my mind with Denison, not 
by similitude, but by graphic contrast, is his junior 
at Oriel by some fourteen years, Tom Hughes. He 
came up in 1842 ; men knew him as an athletic, 
pleasant fellow, pulling always in fours and eights, 
eclipsed somewhat by his then more notable brother 
George. Between George Hughes and Denison 
there were many points of resemblance, but Tom 
was everything that Denison was not. Denison 
was a Don, Tom was a Bohemian ; Denison a 
sacerdotalist in white cravat and Master's hood, 
Hughes a humanist in flannel shirt and shooting 
jacket. Denison was an incarnation of lost causes, 
Hughes the pilot of a beneficent future. Denison 
rode a painted rocking-horse to tilt with theological 
windmills, Tom rushed to spike the guns of social 
selfishness, like his own East in the trenches of the 
Sutlej forts. The historian of the century, if he 
recalls Denison at all, will speak of him as the high- 
bred clerical aristocrat, relic of a class extinct. He 
will extol Hughes as pioneer of a new and ardent 
realism, shaping itself to-day under fresh conditions, 
yet essentially accordant with his creed ; as labour- 
ing to alleviate the discontent of the many by the 
self-sacrifice of the few, to extinguish class antago- 
nism and bridge social chasm, to replace an oligarchy 
of prescriptive privilege, rank, and wealth, by a 
1 Appendix O. 



ORIEL 195 

nobler timocracy of eminence in intellectual ac- 
quirement and in evangelical generosity of aim. 
Even as an undergraduate Hughes was a " Christian 
Chartist/' in full sympathy with the passionate dis- 
content which English proletarian misery well 
justified, yet holding that the party of upheaval 
must be led by men of property and social rank, if 
civil war were to be averted by peaceful civic re- 
construction. His Radicalism, both at Oxford and 
elsewhere, was ludicrously composite ; Colonel 
Newcome's electoral programme is hardly a 
travesty of Hughes : " He was for having every 
man to vote, every poor man to labour short time 
and get high wages, every poor curate to be paid 
double or treble, every bishop to be docked of his 
salary and dismissed from the House of Lords ; but 
he was a staunch admirer of that assembly and a 
supporter of the rights of the Crown." And this 
political confusedness was his strength as a social 
iconoclast. The unwashed rallied round a gentle- 
man who was for abolishing the very rich and very 
poor, round a Christian who read Socialism into 
every page of the New Testament ; the aristocracy 
gave ear of necessity to the well-dressed, well-bred 
school and University man, who from their own 
point of view and in their own interest preached 
reform as alternative to revolution. So for a time 
the school of Maurice, Kingsley, Hughes, shaped 
the sentiment and coloured the literature of the 
country ; until, when from the Chartism of the 
Forties was by degrees evolved the Collectivism of 
the Eighties, older Radicals shrank back alarmed 
before the Demos which they had nursed com- 
placently^in its childhood. 



196 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Of his books, two alone probably will live. The 
"Scouring of the White Horse," racy but local, 
interests those only who are familiar with that 
pleasant, sleepy, peaceful Berkshire vale ; his 
" Memoirs of a Brother" leaves, unintentionally 
and quite incorrectly, the impression that the 
muscular representative of the Uffington Hugheses 
must have been an oppressively pragmatical hero ; 
but theme and treatment combine to make the 
two "Tom Browns" immortal. I know no more 
cogent tribute to Arnold's greatness than that 
Rugby alone of all public schools should have 
earned world-wide celebrity by an unrivalled 
biography and an unrivalled epic, both stamped 
in every page with his pre-inspiring impulse, both 
lit from the torch of his Idaean fire. Of Rugby, 
though not of Arnold, Hughes was a better inter- 
preter than Stanley. Dean Lake used to say that 
Stanley never was a boy ; he left school as 
he entered it, something between girl and man. 
Hughes was puerilissimus, boy in virtues and in 
foibles ; and as, on the one hand, Stanley could 
not delineate the rough-and-tumble life which 
moulds nine-tenths of public school boys, could 
never have appreciated or described the football 
match, or the fight with Slogger Williams, so, on 
the other hand, the tribute which Hughes pays 
to Arnold attests that wonderful schoolmaster's 
electric influence on unreceptive ordinary natures 
such as Brown's and East's, no less than on the 
exceptional temperaments of a Vaughan, a Clough, 
a Stanley. Of course, in both books Tom is 
Hughes himself; Arthur, according to Rugby 



ORIEL 



197 



tradition, was a boy named Orlebar ; the " young 
master " was Cotton ; East in the one book, Hardy 
in the other, are probably mere types. And, 
though continuations are usually disappointing, 
I should place "Tom Brown at Oxford" not 
one whit behind its predecessor. Recalling the 
higher fictions which deal with undergraduate life, 
"Reginald Dalton," "Vincent Eden," Peter 
Priggins," "Loss and Gain," "Verdant Green/' 
the Cambridge chapter in "Alton Locke," the 
Boniface chapter in ll Pendennis," I rank "Tom 
Brown " before them all for the vigour and the 
completeness of its portrayal. Every phase of 
College life as it exuberated seventy years ago 
fast and slow, tuft and Bible clerk, reading 
man and lounger ; profligacy and debt, summer 
term and Commemoration, boat races, wines, 
University sermons, passes easily in review, with- 
out Kingsley's hysteria, without Newman's prig- 
gishness, without Hewlett's vulgarity, without 
Lockhart's stiltedness, without Cuthbert Bede's 
burlesque. The New Zealander of A.D. 4000, 
visiting the tangled morasses of the Upper Thames 
which once were Oxford, the crumbling chaos 
of rotting carriages and twisted rails which 
once was Rugby, will annotate his monumental 
work on "Ancient England" with Tom Brown's 
pictures of their ruined sites and Tom Brown's 
chronicles of their academic humour. They seem 
to me somehow memorials of a life fuller, more 
varied, more youthful, than is proved to-day by 
our golden or our gilded juvenility. Stagecoaches, 
postchaises, peashooters meant more fun than 



198 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

first-class carriages and railway novels ; boys were 
" fellows" then, now, save the mark! they are 
"men"; undergraduates who crowded formerly 
the coffee rooms of the Old and New Hummums, 
Tavistock, Bedford, melt to-day into a mammoth 
hotel, gravitate after play and supper to music-halls 
and casinos, instead of applauding Herr von Joel 
or shaking hands with Paddy Green at Evans'. 
I am a fogey, to be sure, and out of date ; but, 
remembering the days when I rode from Southam 
to Rugby on the " Pig and Whistle," or was 
dropped at the Mitre by Jack Adams from the 
box of the Royal Defiance, the days when Cowley 
Marsh was a rush-grown common, and from 
Magdalen bridge to Iffley there was not a single 
roadside house, I feel for those ancient ways and 
vanished hours what our present youngsters will 
mayhap feel for their own some ten or twelve 
lustres hence, and I bless the hand that has pre- 
served the verdure of their antiquity with a pen 
whose vigour and a heart whose freshness bid 
antiquity defiance. 

I have travelled far from Oriel ; I return to 
find Charles Neate on horseback at the Corpus 
corner, his face set towards the meet at Brasenose 
Wood. He began life as 1 , a barrister, but was 
disbarred for horsewhipping (so says one tradi- 
tion ; for kicking, says another), Bethell, known 
later as Lord Westbury, then as afterwards the 
tyrant of the profession, who had insulted him in 
court. He was cosmopolitan, at home in Paris, 
a member of London clubs, a mighty hunter. He 



ORIEL 199 

stood for Oxford City in the Fifties as a Radical, 
and was elected, but unseated for bribery, negotiated 
I was told, by one of his committee, and without 
his knowledge. While in the House he became 
intimate with John Bright. I have heard him 
describe their first accost. The smoking-room 
was crowded ; Bright sat upon one chair, and 
leaned his arm across the back of another. Neate 
asked him if he required two seats. " Yes, I do ; 
but I'll get you another "which he did. Neate 
gave his name, and a friendship soon sprang 
up. He brought Bright down to Oxford; they 
came together to a Congregation, where we were 
voting on some election. The papers, having been 
counted by the Proctors and the result announced, 
were burned on a brazier in the room, a custom 
long since extinct ; Bright expressing his amused 
delight it was before the Ballot to find the secret 
vote enforced in the University of Oxford. Neate 
was in the Theatre when Dizzy made his famous 
" angel " speech, at a meeting of the Diocesan 
Association, S. Oxon in the chair. "What is the 
question now placed before society with a glib 
assurance the most astounding ? The question 
is this Is man an ape or an angel ? My lord, 
I am on the side of the angels." Neate, in a 
delicious set of Sapphics, 1 inclined rather to range 
the great posture master on the other side : 

"Angela quis te similem putaret 
Esse, vel divis atavis creatum, 
Cum tuas plane referat dolosas 
Simius artes ? " 

1 Appendix P. 



CHAPTER XII 

BALLIOL 

" There is a history in all men's lives 
Figuring the nature of the times deceased; 
The which observed, a man may prophesy, 
With a near aim, of the main chance of things 
As yet not come to life, which in their seeds 
And weak beginnings lie intreasured." 

SHAKESPEARE. 

Two Masters of Balliol Jenkyns and Jowett The One who came 
between The Succession to Scott Temple and Jowett Henry 
Wall Dean Lake "The Serpent" Lake on Arnold Jowett 
and Dr. Johnson Obiter Dicta A Conversation Jowett's un- 
familiarity with Natural Science Temple T. H. Green. 

FOR elderly men of to-day the term " Master of 
Balliol" conjures up two visions. They think of 
Jenkyns in the Thirties and Forties, of Jowett in 
the Seventies and Eighties ; they do not think of 
Scott, who came between. Overlaid, enveloped, 
eclipsed by the two luminaries who " went behind 
him and before," he somehow drops out of sight ; 
his reign is an intervention, and is remembered 
only with an effort. His was a career of early 
promise unusual, but unfulfilled. He came from 
Shrewsbury to Oxford as the best of Butler's pupils, 
won the Craven and Ireland and the Latin Essay, 
was First Class man and Fellow of Balliol. His 
notes to the "Uniomachia" and his Homerics on 
the Chancellorship showed rare aptness and re- 



BALLIOL 



201 



source in the exceptional felicities of Greek and 
Latin scholarship. In 1834, the year after his 
degree, Talboys, the leading Oxford bookseller, 
proposed to him to undertake the translation of 
Passow's German-Greek Lexicon ; he consented 
on condition that with him Liddell might be 
associated. The Lexicon appeared in 1843 ; the 
first edition is now a curious rarity; when shortly 
before his death Liddell wished to place it in the 
Christchurch Library, it was long before he could 
obtain a copy. Their several shares in it cannot 
be known : Westminster naturally placed Scott 
below Liddell in its construction. The well-known 
lines, 

" Two men wrote a Lexicon, Liddell and Scott ; 
One half was clever, one half was not. 
Give me the answer, boys, quick, to this riddle, 
Which was by Scott, and which was by Liddell ? " 

were an epigram sent up by a boy at the " trials " 
for the Maunday Thursday money, on the thesis 
" Scribimus indocti doctique." The Rev. W. G. 
Armitstead, Vicar of Goosetree, writes to me that 
he was present in school as a boy when the lines 
were composed, and according to custom were 
read aloud by Liddell, who complimented their 
author with the full four-coin meed of fourpenny> 
threepenny, twopenny, penny silver pieces, awarded 
to the best composition. A more decided view of 
the two partners' relative claims emanated from 
Balliol, in a not very elegant triplet : 

" Part of it's good, and part of it's rot : 
The part that is good was written by Scott : 
By Liddell was written the part that is not." 



202 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Scott retired to a College living; and the later 
editions, changing a tentative into a masterpiece, 
owed most of their excellence to Liddell, whose 
desire for its linguistic revision by Max Miiller was 
foiled by Scott's apathy or opposition. In 1854 
the old Master died, the College was divided as 
to his successor. The senior Fellows wished for 
Temple, an equal number of the juniors wished 
for Jowett ; James Riddell wanted Scott, but 
would vote for Jowett rather than for Temple. So 
at the last moment Temple's supporters threw him 
over for Scott, securing Riddell's vote. For ten 
years he was an obstructive, wielding his numerical 
ascendancy to crush all Jowett's schemes of reform. 
"Your head," said Jowett to a Fellow of another 
College, " seems to be an astute person, who works 
by winning confidence ; here we have a bare 
struggle for power " ; and when, in 1865, successive 
elections to Fellowships had given Jowett a 
majority, Scott's influence in the College waned. 
Nor was he effective beyond the walls of Balliol. 
Soon after his appointment he preached a magnifi- 
cent University sermon on Dives and Lazarus, 
with application of the "five brethren" episode to 
the home ties, feelings, scruples, tenderness of 
undergraduates. When he next occupied the 
pulpit, St. Mary's was filled from entrance door to 
organ screen; but the sermon was absolutely dull 
on Hezekiah's song nor did he ever again 
command an audience ; in his Headship as i-n 
his earlier career he left, as some one says, a 
great future behind him. In 1870 Gladstone, at 
Lowe's entreaty, appointed him to the Deanery of 



BALLIOL 203 

Rochester in order to make room for Jowett, and 
he descended into decanal quietude. 

Scott's firmest supporter in College had been 
Henry Wall, Lecturer and Bursar : he figures in 
the " Grand Logic Sweepstakes" as Barbadoes, 
having been born in that island. It was he who 
led the opposition to Max Miiller for the "half-a- 
brick" reason that he was a foreigner. His intellect 
was clear, logical, penetrating; his temper some- 
what arrogant. His lectures, which as Prelector 
of Logic he delivered publicly in Balliol Hall to all 
who chose to bring the statutory guinea, were 
cosmic in their reduction and formularisation of 
the Aldrich-Aristotle chaos. Keen-eyed, sharp- 
nosed, vehement in manner and gesture, he fired 
off questions as he went along at this or that student 
who caught his eye, with joyous acceptance of a 
neat response, scornful pounce on a dull or inat- 
tentive answerer. He was an undesirable dinner 
guest, starting questions which he seemed to have 
prepared beforehand for the pleasure of showing 
off his dexterity in word fence, rousing temper, and 
spoiling conversational amenities. He was a great 
dancer : the waltz of those days was a serious 
department of life, "to be wooed with incessant 
thought and patient renunciation of small desires." 
Readers of " Pelham " does any one read " Pelham " 
now ? will remember how Lady Charlotte im- 
pressed upon her fashionable son the moral duty 
of daily practice, with a chair if no partner could 
be obtained ; and to see Wall's thin legs twinkle in 
the mazy was a memorable experience. He was 
exceedingly hospitable ; giving dances, sometimes 



26 4 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

on a large scale in Wyatt's Rooms, oftener at his 
snug little house in New Inn Hall Lane, to the 
music of old Grimmett's harp and fiddle. With 
him lived a stout, florid sister, dressed in many- 
coloured garments, a niece whom pupils knew as 
"Bet," and a Pomeranian " Fop " who suffered 
many things when his master's back was turned. 
He was great in charades, personating now a Radical 
mob orator, now an ancient crone, now a shy, 
clumsy, gaping freshman. When well on in years 
he made a January and May marriage ; the bachelor 
home was recast; poor Bet had died, Fop had 
borne his mistress company to that equal sky, 
the jovial sister subsided into small lodgings over 
a baker's shop in Holywell : miscentur Mcenia 
luctu. 

Senior to Scott and Wall was the redoubtable 
Francis Newman, whose " Phases of Faith " will 
probably preserve his name. He gained a Double 
First in 1826, being the first man who ever offered 
in the Schools the Higher Mathematics analytically 
treated. Cooke, afterwards Sedleian Reader, pro- 
nounced that they could not, according to the 
Statute, pass beyond the Geometry of Newton ; 
but Walker, Experimental Philosophy Professor, 
who probably of the three examiners alone knew 
the subject, persuaded his colleagues to let him 
examine Newman in the work he offered ; and the 
candidate's answers were so brilliant, that the 
examiners, not content with awarding his First, 
presented him with finely bound copies of La Place 
and La Grange. He once or twice stayed with me 
at Taunton, sending word beforehand that he was a 



BALLIOL 205 

vegetarian, but eating copiously of fish and eggs. 
In company he did not so much converse as emit 
pilulous dogmas from his thin lips in a prim, 
didactic, authoritative tone ; on Ghosts and Fairy 
Legends as appropriate to children's minds, on the 
Teutonic view of the Devil with its humorous tinge, 
on Almsgiving in the streets, on Home Tooke and 
Cobbett, on the position of women in Society, on 
phonetic spelling, on the Saturday Review. I re- 
member too his delivering a fluent, venomous 
Philippic against Physical Science, in which he had 
observed me to be deeply interested. He was a slave 
to total abstinence, to anti-vaccination, to every kind 
of fad. He would stalk the streets with me, silent 
and absorbed, in a Tyrolese hat, and a short cloak 
with long tassels, winning from the street-boys 
rather formidable attentions : 

" Statua taciturnius exit 
Plerumque, et risu populum quatit." 

Prominent in College work and discipline, and 
dying at a great age only a few years ago, was Dean 
Lake. I saw him first in 1842, when Clough, with 
whom I was reading at the time, took me to breakfast 
in his rooms. They looked into the quad ; and 
as we stood at the window after breakfast he pointed 
out a black-haired, smooth-cheeked, ruddy under- 
graduate, and said, " Notice that man ; he will be 
our Double First this year." It was Temple ; and 
I went with Clough into the Schools to hear his 
Viva Voce. Lake was kind to me after that ; one 
day took me for a walk. We encountered his 
doctor in Broad Street, and they stopped to talk. 



206 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

He was looking wretchedly ill, red-nosed, pale, and 
thin, admitted in answer to questions that he had 
fasted during Lent ; and I listened unnoticed to the 
wise earnestness with which the doctor, a man 
greatly respected and beloved, urged upon him the 
duty of caring for his body as the condition of all 
useful work. As a fact, the phase of feeling which 
took shape with him in bodily maceration was a 
transient one ; he had been bitten by the Newmania, 
but he soon, like Goldsmith's man of Islington, 
recovered of the bite. He was not liked either as 
Tutor or as Proctor. His manner was cold, sar- 
castic, sneering ; and a certain slyness earned him 
the nickname of " Serpent," applied originally at 
Rugby in reference to his sinuous shuffling 
walk, and retained by Balliol undergraduates 
as characterising his methods of College dis- 
cipline. 

It is no less significant of the deviating intellectual 
vacillations, which in spite of his great abilities 
disqualified him for leadership, and go far to explain, 
what has been often cited as unintelligible, his 
failure to attain conspicuous and commanding 
eminence. When, in 1849, young Lancaster of 
Balliol, for playfully fastening up and painting a 
Tutor's oak, was summoned before a Common 
Room meeting to receive sentence, the scene was 
thus rendered by a forgotten wit : 

Incipit "Jinks." 

And first out spake "the Master": "The young man must 

go down, 
And when a twelvemonth has elapsed he may resume his 

gown." 






BALLIOL 207 

Serpens sequitur. 

And the Serpent's brow was calm, and the Serpent's voice 

was low ; 

" I'm sorry, Mr. Lancaster, but really you must go. 
The fact has come so clearly before the Tutor's knowledge, 
And if we once pass over this, what rules can bind the College ?" 

Lancaster respondet. 

Then out spake Harry Lancaster, that man of iron pate : 
" I know, ye Dons, I must have gone a mucker soon or late ; 
But this I say, and swear it too, without or cheek or funk, 

The Tutor may have been screwed up, I'm if / was 

drunk." 

He left to Mrs. Goddard the packing of his togs, 
He paid no ticks, with chums exchanged no farewell dialogues ; 
But in a fury flinging down 
His academic cap and gown, 
And striding madly through the town, 
Rushed, headlong, to the dogs ! 

Lake bore, for strictly Balliol consumption, another 
playful sobriquet, an obvious degradation of his 
name. Walking one day with John Conington, 
he said, "Do you know, Conington, that the men 
call you the Sick Vulture ? " Conington turned 
on him his blank, pallid moon-face, and said, 
" Do you know, Lake, that the men call you 
Puddle?" There is of the retort yet another 
rendering, which I cannot bring myself to write. 
In 1858 he took the College living of Huntspill, 
then a very valuable incumbency, but a secluded, 
unhealthy, stagnant village in the Bristol Channel 
marshes. He was not the man to spend there 
much of his time : he kept a capable curate, a 
muscular Christian he half admiringly, half con- 
temptuously, called him ; and lived mostly in 



208 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

London, enjoying club life at the Athenaeum, and 
labouring for a long time on the Duke of New- 
castle's Education Commission. I remember 
standing with him at the Highbridge Station, 
when one of his principal farmers came up and 
said, "We don't see much of you at Huntspill, 
Mr. Lake." "You may depend upon it," said the 
faithful herdman, "that you won't see more of 
me than I can help." He was one of the most 
active members of the Commission, supporting 
the large recommendations which, novel and 
startling at the time, were all eventually embodied 
in Mr. Forster's Act. He told me that the secre- 
tary, Fitzjames Stephen, a man in the habit of 
riding rough-shod over his fellows, tried to domi- 
nate and bully the Commissioners. They deputed 
to Lake the task of extinguishing him, and in 
rebuke to some instance of unwarrantable inter- 
ference he went across to the secretary and ex- 
plained to him with serpentine grace that he was 
intruding on their prerogative and must confine 
himself to his proper function. The hint was 
taken perforce ; but one of the reporters said 
afterwards to Lake, "The expression of Mr. 
Stephen's countenance when you spoke to him, 
sir, was truly diabolical." I saw a good deal of 
him during his visits to Huntspill. He attended 
educational meetings in which I was interested, 
an animated, nay violent speaker : arms and coat- 
tails flew about while he strode hither and thither : 
for his after-dinner orations we used to clear out 
of his way the wineglasses and other unstable 
appurtenances of dessert. Of clerical assemblies 



BALLIOL 



209 



he fought shy. Posing at that time as an advanced 
Liberal and a Broad Churchman, his plea for un- 
fettered admission of Nonconformists to all our 
schools, and his denunciation of Bishop Gray, 
just then tramping Somersetshire in his crusade 
against Colenso, gave deep offence to Philistia. 
He would have liked to be Regius Professor of 
Divinity, and was bitterly savage at Payne Smith's 
appointment. Lord Palmerston consulted Jeune ; 
and Jeune, who while solitary as Vice-Chancellor 
in the Long Vacation had seen much of Smith, 
then a sub-librarian at the Bodleian, was impressed 
by his Oriental erudition and his views on Mes- 
sianic prophecy, and named him at once. I 
dare say the Chair lost nothing by his occupancy 
rather than by Lake's, who was but an amateur 
theologian ; his conception of theology not Bib- 
lical criticism, hermeneutics, exegesis, scientific 
discernment of the spiritual unity underlying all 
higher forms of religion, but the regulation dog- 
matism which is in request with Anglican bishops 
and equips for Anglican Orders. 

None the less, at every period of his life, he 
showed himself extraordinarily capable. His Rugby 
schooldays placed him in the inner circle of 
Arnold's best beloved and cherished pupils : as 
a Balliol Tutor he was among the first to initiate 
that higher view of the relation between teacher 
and taught which Jowett carried to perfection. 
The organisation of the new School of Law and 
Modern History in 1853 was placed almost en- 
tirely in his hands. When he was appointed by 
the War Office in 1856 on a Commission of In- 

O 



210 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

quiry into the great continental military schools, 
his two associates, both officers of high rank, bore 
testimony to the valuable non-professional influ- 
ence on their counsels of a civilian so highly 
educated, so tactful, so consummate in practical 
aptitude. At Durham he used his decanal autho- 
rity to facilitate the establishment of a Newcastle 
Science College which Huxley had long been 
urging. He reanimated the moribund Durham 
University, raising the number of students from 
fifty to two hundred ; and he restored to dignity 
and beauty the inadequate services and decaying 
fabric of the grand Cathedral. 

He was not always facile a vivre : many persons 
noted and still recall him as cold, stern, masterful. 
Shy he may have been it is the accepted excuse 
for stiffness superior to his company he must 
often have felt himself ; and, a Don by constitution 
and training, he was more likely to exhibit such 
consciousness than to veil it. But with intimates 
he was cordial, trustful, staunch, affectionate ; and 
he never forgot old friends. In the company of 
such he was a very charming talker ; his con- 
versation not so much ornate with anecdote, 
quotation, epigram, as fresh and mobile through 
its vivid recollection of events, places, men ; keenly 
logical without pedantry, flowing in crisp, well 
poised, comprehensive sentences, mindful ever of 
the colloquial rights of others. 

He stayed in my house more than once, full 
always of interesting talk. He gave us one even- 
ing a minute description of Dr. Arnold's death. 
He was a guest in the School House at the time ; 



BALLIOL 211 

the five younger children had gone to Fox How, 
and all were to follow in a day or two, when 
the school should have broken up. He and the 
Doctor strolled till dusk on the Sunday evening 
in the Head Master's garden overlooking the 
School Close. Their talk was of the New Testa- 
ment writers, and he recalled the almost angry 
vehemence with which Arnold resented a prefer- 
ence of St. Paul to St. John. The great Head 
Master died early next morning, and Lake went 
down to Fox How with the tidings. He dwelt 
on the pathos of the journey, the beauty of the 
Rothay Valley as he drove along it from the 
head of Windermere in the early summer dawn, 
the exquisite peacefulness of the tree-shaded home. 
It was Arnold's forty-seventh birthday, and the 
children had prepared to celebrate it; they were 
waked instead to learn the news, and went back 
with Lake to see their father's face in death. He 
went on to talk of his old master, depreciating 
the value of his influence. Electric and over- 
powering, it was, he said, more than boys nature 
could stand ; coming on them prematurely, in- 
fusing priggishness rather than principle. " Hal- 
ford Vaughan once agreed with me that it took 
five years to recover from the mental and moral 
distortion which it involved." One trait of char- 
acter, said to have been strongly marked at Oxford, 
we noticed in him more than once, a sort of 
superior tuft-hunting : not, of course, the vulgar 
deference to social rank and wealth, but a rather 
too exclusive pursuit of and attention to the man 
of highest note in any company. I met him once 



212 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

at a large dinner party. He found me alone when 
he entered, and began to talk ; presently the Head 
Master of Winchester was announced, and for him 
Lake naturally left me. But on the arrival of 
Eothen Kinglake the Head Master found himself 
deserted ; and when the party was joined by 
Temple, then in the splendour of his pre-episcopal 
repute, Eothen in his turn was dropped. Of 
course, we the rejected ones, combining on the 
common ground of supersession, discussed our 
friend's peculiarity with good-humoured impar- 
tiality. 

He was in his last days every inch a Dean. His 
tall figure and authoritative diction suited the 
hieratic consequence of gaiters and apron. His 
departure left a gap, which, happily for the Cathe- 
dral and the University, came to be filled by a 
successor of attainments not less brilliant and of 
presence equally imposing. Reckoning him up from 
his Oxford and his Huntspill days, I should say 
that he was too self-centred and withdrawn, too 
aggressively the superior person, to be popular ; 
that, winning an undoubtedly high position, his 
performance scarcely equalled the expectation men 
had formed of him ; that he remained through life 
a conspicuous and interesting figure rather than 
an effectual and influential force. 

Of Jowett I shall not say much. The "Jowler 
myths " served their purpose and are exploded ; 
the facts of his life are told abundantly in the 
Biography, a book which for my own part I 
never open without extracting from it gold unal- 
loyed. I was so fortunate once as to meet him 



BALLIOL 

in a country house ; in such retreats he was 
always at his best, communicative, receptive, easy. 
The talk turned on obscure passages in well-known 
poems Tennyson's "one clear harp," Newman's 
" those angel faces" which their authors when 
challenged could not or would not explain. He 
quoted Goldsmith and Johnson's colloquy over 
the word "slow" in the opening line of "The Tra- 
veller." Asked by some one if he meant tardiness 
of locomotion, Goldsmith said yes. Johnson inter- 
posed, "No, sir, you do not mean tardiness of 
locomotion ; you mean that sluggishness of mind 
which comes upon a man in solitude." He repeated 
the paragraph exactly, rolling it out with relish. 
Our host, his old pupil, told us afterwards that 
he believed Jowett knew his Boswell by heart ; 
no book oftener on his lips or pen. We passed 
to the "base Judaean " in "Othello." "Herod 
and Mariamne," Barabas and his daughter in the 
"Jew of Malta," were proposed as illustrations. 
The last interested him much, and he asked many 
questions about the play, which he seemed not 
to have read ; but next morning he said, " I have 
been thinking it over ; it can only mean the 
Jewish nation and Christ." He went on to con- 
demn Gervinus' Commentary, but found we were 
all against him. A lady asked him whether Bishop 
Butler's saying is sound, that, in general no part 
of our time is more idly spent than the time spent 
in reading. He roused himself to utter very em- 
phatically, "No." "Mr. Pattison says so." "Mr. 
Pattison would make all reading difficult, he would 
have it so perfect and accurate." "Yet one sits at 



2i 4 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

the feet of a great man." "You would not give 
up your common-sense if you do sit at a great 
man's feet." She asked his opinion of Greg. He 
spoke admiringly of his " Enigmas " ; went on to 
describe him as a most curious little man, aged 
seventy, just married, likely to be always weigh- 
ing his wife's qualities and to molest her when 
he found them wanting. Then we discussed old 
Oxonians. He spoke with absolute reverence of 
Arnold. Pusey, he thought, had deteriorated ; once 
innocent and a saint, he had become "cunning 
and almost worldly." Temple, too, had suffered 
from episcopacy. He pronounced the best Oxford 
Colleges it was in 1874 to be Balliol, New Col- 
lege, University, Trinity, Lincoln. He withdrew 
after breakfast to his Plato, but we had a long 
walk on Exmoor in the afternoon. As we sat 
on the hillside, watching the " shadowy main dim- 
tinted," along which wounded Arthur was borne 
by weeping queens in dusky barge to Avilion, the 
blue Atlantic water of the incoming tide pushing 
itself in great wedges up the brown Severn sea, 
I picked up and showed him a chunk of old red 
sandstone at my feet, flecked with minute white 
spots, which under my Coddington lens became 
lichens exquisite in shape and chasing. I recall 
his almost childlike amazement and delight, his 
regretful confession that to his mind all natural 
science was a blank, wisdom at one entrance quite 
shut out. He would have been the first to re- 
pudiate the self-consciousness of omniscience sug- 
gested by the famous stanza in the "Masque of 
Balliol," 



BALLIOL 415 

" I come first, my name is Jowett ; 
What there is to know, I know it. 
I'm the Master of this College ; 
What I know not is not knowledge," 

which merely recalls a saying of Madame de 
Stae'l : " Monsieur ', je comprends tout ce qui merite 
d'etre compris ; ce que je ne comprends nest rien" 
Much the same thing is said, more audaciously, in 
a German epigram 

" Gott weiss viel ; 
Doch mehr der Herr Professor : 

Gott weiss alles ! 
Doch er alles besser." 

He had, in fact, several times, with a hanker- 
ing after the unknown, attended meetings of the 
British Association. In one of these an amusing 
incident occurred. The meeting was at Newcastle, 
but on the Sunday men went to Durham, where 
the fathers of the Cathedral looked askance at 
the sages in their midst, and appointed Handel's 
" What tho' I trace" as a significant anthem for the 
Sunday service. The preacher was Dr. Sanders 
Evans, a famous Cambridge Scholar, and a Shrews- 
bury pupil of Butler, but a man eccentric, distrait, 
and very nervous. He had prepared, for the 
ordinary congregation, a learned sermon on " Essays 
and Reviews," in which he had assailed the Greek 
of Jowett's book on St. Paul's Epistles ; but his 
heart failed him when on entering the Cathedral he 
spied Jowett's white head in a stall. It is one thing 
to anatomise a book, quite another to vivisect its 
author, and Evans shrank from the operation. 
What was to be done ? There was present in 



216 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

his place a certain Canon and Archdeacon Bland, 
who was known to carry a sermon in his pocket 
wherever he might be. To him was sent a hurried 
message, and he calmly preached his inappropriate 
but harmless pocketful. Jowett was not told of the 
incident, but remarked upon the badness of the 
sermon. 

I told, on p. 205, how, looking from Lake's Balliol 
windows, I saw Temple in the Quad below. The 
black-haired, smooth-cheeked, ruddy undergraduate 
had passed through a Spartan training very unlike 
that of his comfortably nurtured associates. He 
had come from a poverty-stricken home, at whose 
frugal board dry bread was the staple food ; had 
been trained with his brothers and sisters to manual 
labour ; the boys ploughing and gardening, the 
girls working in the kitchen, house, and dairy : 

" Proles Sabellis docta ligonibus 
Versare glebas, et severse 

Matris ad arbitrium recisos 
Portare fustes." 

Temple's " severa mater " was the founder of his 
moral, intellectual, and religious character. Know- 
ing not a word of Latin, she taught him his Eton 
Latin grammar from the first page to the last ; took 
him with the aid of a key through Arithmetic and 
Algebra, intelligence in each case following upon 
memory. Her discipline was so judicious that her 
children seem never to have felt the possibility 
of being other than obedient. Elected when seven- 
teen years old to a Blundell Scholarship at Balliol, 
he lived with strictest economy. He drank no 
wine, in the coldest weather had no fire in his 









BALLIOL 217 

rooms, obtained his Double First entirely without 
private tuition ; a feat performed, it is said, by only 
one other man in undergraduate annals, the late 
Bishop Stubbs. His undergraduate career coin- 
cided with the crisis of the Oxford Movement : its 
protagonist at Balliol was his Tutor Ward, whose 
crushing logical insistency perverted Clough, im- 
pelled Newman, baffled Tait, deeply influenced 
Temple. He told his anxieties to his mother ; her 
quiet response that he should avoid all discussion 
and think only of his books gave him timely help ; he 
turned from Church reform, the via media, and Tract 
90, to the stern requirements of the Schools ; and his 
Double First was the result. After a few years as 
Balliol Tutor he became Principal of Kneller Hall, 
then, Inspector of Training Colleges ; was actively 
concerned with Canon Brereton and Acland in 
establishing the Oxford Local Examinations; in 1857 
went as Head Master to Rugby. He found it in 
the trough of the wave ; came to it an Arnold 
Redivivus. The boys received him with distrust ; 
feared from his reforming energy the extinction of 
their cherished absurdities and inherited rights ; 
were startled by the contrast between Goulburn, 
placid, affected, cassocked, and his successor's 
wide shirt-front, rasping voice, martial stride: old 
Bennett, the patriarchal School Tonsor, who had 
shorn the boys' hair far back into the times of Dr. 
Wooll, used to relate the consternation with which 
the new Head Master was surveyed by Town and 
School, as he walked up from the station in a 
swallow -tailed coat, with a carpet-bag in his hand. 
But the boys soon learned to love the strong, just, 



2i 8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

humorous man, to respect the illuminating teacher, 
to bow before the wonderful Sunday sermons, 
which recalled to older listeners at once Arnold 
and Newman ; while the discovery that he could 
walk eighteen miles in three hours, and had 
privately climbed for amusement all the big elm 
trees in the School Close, captured them on their 
athletic side : dislike gave way to appreciation, 
appreciation to hero-worship. "Temple is all 
right, mother," wrote home a Sixth Form boy whose 
parents had expressed alarm as to the political 
and religious influence of the new Head Master ; 
" Temple is all right ; but if he turns Mahometan all 
the School will turn too." So with the Masters : those 
already in the School, who had hitherto resembled 
independent vassals under a mediaeval monarch, at 
once recognised the claims and did homage to 
the strength of a suzerain who fulfilled Carlyle's 
conception of the Konig ; the new comers imbibed 
the influence of his character, and transmitted 
it to the boys. 

Why did he leave Rugby after a reign of only 
twelve years ? Why exchange the freedom, inde- 
pendence, animating environment of a great Head 
Master for the chains which, however gilded, must 
shackle an Anglican bishop ? By Englishmen 
generally the step was regarded as something of a 
descent ; outside his new diocese he was not quite 
the man he had been before. But episcopal 
trappings did not change him ; and the power which 
had restored Rugby soon renovated Exeter. His 
predecessor had governed by system and by fear ; 
for machinery Temple substituted life ; into system 






BALLIOL 219 

he infused the spirit of service. Confident in his 
own magnetic will veils tantummodo, qucs tua 
virtus, expugnabis he made it his first policy to 
know and to be known. Not only the popular 
centres, but the small towns and villages, thinly 
inhabited moors and scattered tors, whose primi- 
tive tenants had never seen a bishop, faced the 
virile personality, recognised the West Country 
burr, heard the pleadings, passionate and some- 
times tearful, which awoke spiritual consciousness 
and stirred regenerating resolve. Laymen bowed 
before a leader who could lead ; Dissenters saw a 
new Wesley in their midst ; farmers were subju- 
gated by the strong man who had himself followed 
the plough ; clergy, looking at first distrustfully upon 
a bishop banned by a clerical Convocation, were 
shamed, then won, into acceptance and imitation. 
" Every clergyman," said Dean Cowie after some 
years had passed, " is doing twice as much as he did 
before ; and they say it is all your doing ; " he had 
not set himself to gain them, but inevitably he gained 
them, because from the first he came to serve. 

He moved to London in 1885 ; the loud and 
universal sorrow at his departure reviving a doubt 
frequently expressed, whether the translation of an 
approved and popular prelate, except possibly to a 
Primacy, is not in all cases a mistake. He there 
strode into the heart of his work, treading on the 
toes of men more sensitive than were the com- 
paratively Boeotian clergy whom he had left behind 
in Devonshire. Heroes built like him, "temples 
without polished corners," come amongst us as his 
Master came, el? /cpiaiv, to test capacity of discern- 



220 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

ment, to attract nobleness, repel superficiality and 
pettiness. Men priggish, self-complacent, languid, 
or unreal, disliked him cordially ; the House of 
Lords never to the last accepted him ; men high 
minded, genuine, spiritually akin, found him out 
and were drawn to him at once. Dr. Gore glorified 
in receiving from him a not unmerited snub. " We 
have a man here," said Capel Cure, listening to his 
somewhat stern repulse of irrelevant clerical criti- 
cism. "If he sometimes treated us like school- 
boys," said another, " we deserved it, and were all 
the better for being back in school again." 

His recorded sayings, pithy or humorous, help 
out our conception of the man. Such are his 
"You cannot grow genius, but you can grow 
talent ; " " it is not knowledge chiefly, but char- 
acter, that England wants ; " " they wish me to 
formulate a policy ; I don't believe in formulated 
policies ; " " one is brought through somehow if 
one always does one's best;" "help in work is 
something ; I want companionship more." Some 
of his dicta are in a lighter mood. "I am very 
pleased, my Lord," began a Very Reverend at a 
missionary meeting. " You are not," snapped the 
chairman, who had taught English Grammar in 
his day; "you are very much pleased." "Wher- 
ever I go, they give me cold chicken and 'the 
Church's one foundation/ and I hate both." " My 
aunt was prevented from sailing in a ship which 
sank ; would you not, my Lord, call that a provi- 
dential interposition ? " " Can't tell, did not know 
your aunt." A vicar, pointing to a Nonconformist 
Chapel "That, my Lord, is where all the people 



BALLIOL 



221 






go." Bishop, turning on him " WHY?" His 
rough speeches sometimes looked brutal in print, 
but were not so when tempered by the merry smile 
which softened them. He had a natural inborn 
heartiness, Goethe's Hoftlichkeit des Herzens, the 
politeness of helpful benevolent good feeling ; he 
was never ill-natured or cynical ; the smooth mask 
of conventional courtesy he could not wear. " I 
hate civility, don't you ? " 

His last public appearance many of us would 
gladly forget. "That he should have been so domi- 
nated by his surpliced legions," wrote to me one of 
his most devoted friends and colleagues, "as to 
accept Balfour's Education Bill, and then to be 
cut short by fatal illness before he poured out his 
whole soul in favour of making common cause 
with united Christianity, is the tragedy of his life." 
Yet to the old among us he stands out as a man 
nobler than his fellows, laborious, disinterested, 
self-reliant, with a grand conception of this life, 
a clear vision of the next ; and the character has 
no less its special meaning for the young. " The 
air of perpetual Spring blows round his grave ; the 
thought of him speaks reality and hope ; and these 
are the memories which live." 

The changes of Oxford life are swift ; the water 
flows fast under Folly Bridge ; and to the present 
generation T. H. Green is little more than a name. 
Yet before his early death he had attained a repute 
and wielded an influence in the University which 
no one has since surpassed. His namesake the 
historian, coming up to Oxford and invited by him 
to dinner, sent word that "the shadow would gladly 



222 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

wait upon the substance"; a distinguished states- 
man still living, who has perhaps by this time 
outgrown his youthful enthusiam, made a rever- 
ential pilgrimage to Green's birthplace ; and the 
philosopher figures in " Robert Elsmere " as the 
infallible guide and oracle of his day to all who 
were mentally doubtful, struggling, and distressed. 
His outward life was devoid of incident : he repre- 
sents the history of a mind, inert and slow at first, 
feeding on its own thoughts, not on the thoughts of 
others ; a plant growing, not a brick being moulded. 
Both as schoolboy and undergraduate he was out 
of touch with his surroundings ; he was influenced 
at Oxford by Jowett, Conington, Charles Parker, 
and by no one else ; the only authors who in- 
spired him were Wordsworth, Carlyle, Maurice, and 
Fichte. He cared little for literary scholarship, 
nothing for academic distinction ; his passion was 
for philosophy and metaphysics, as ministering to 
the problems of life which alone he deemed worth 
solving. Rival philosophers professed to see a 
fundamental incoherence in his thoughts ; and the 
necessary complexities of language which ham- 
pered their expression were ridiculed in an amusing 
verse of the " Masque of Balliol." But he helped 
to form the highest minds amongst his contempo- 
raries ; and those who now read the chapter of his 
biography called " Religious Principles " will under- 
stand the height of habitual exaltation to which 
he soared ; an abiding grasp of the Unseen, of 
Christianity, of the spiritual life, of human duty, 
before which the dogmatic materialism of polemic 
sects and schisms dwindles into littleness. 



CHAPTER XIII 

TRINITY 

",'Tis opportune to look back upon old times: great examples 
groiv thin, and to be fetched from the past world" 

SIR THOMAS BROWN. 

President Ingram Guillemard Lord Ward Isaac Williams 
Monsignor Patterson Fred. Meyrick Tommy Short. 

I WAS one day in company with a distinguished 
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Mention 
happened to be made of an interesting Roman 
dignitary lately dead, and I recalled him as in my 
early days a " Fellow of Trinity." The Cambridge 
Don looked up surprised and doubtful, so I hastened, 
amid the great amusement of the company, to 
explain that there exists at Oxford a College which 
presumes to bear that name, and that to this 
College Monsignor Patterson had belonged. To 
be sure, our Trinity cannot hang over its high 
table portraits of Bacon and Newton, nor have its 
recent Heads ranked with Whewell for omni- 
science or for wit" with Thompson ; but it has 
played a famous part, and to my own memory it 
is fragrant. Its President in my early days was 
Ingram, antiquary, Anglo-Saxon scholar, author of 
a finely illustrated tl Memorials of Oxford." I 
recall him as a feeble old gentleman, bent nearly 

double, preserving and relating anecdotes, tradi- 

223 



224 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

tional and personal, of College heroes in the past 
of Tom Warton, Budgell, Lisle Bowles, Kett. 
He succeeded stately Dr. Chapman, whose daughter, 
my shrewd old neighbour in Holywell, surviving 
her father more than half a century, with sixty 
years of Oxford prattle at her fluent tongue's end, 
was run over and killed by a cricketing brake in 
the early sixties. Ingram was a Wykehamist, and 
dined always at our New College Gaudy, invariably 
in his after-dinner speech making modest allusion 
to "my little work." Of his Fellows I remember 
Guillemard, the non-placeting Proctor, along with 
Church, of 1845; Copeland, earliest disciple and 
latest friend of Newman ; Claughton, tutor to 
young Lord Ward, whose sister he married, was 
presented by him to the valuable living of Kidder- 
minster, and became Bishop of Rochester. Lord 
Ward, afterwards Lord Dudley, was conspicuous 
by his beautiful face and long waving hair, which 
the Paris ladies imitated on their own heads by 
crimping-irons. He used to come to my father's 
accompanied by an enormous dog, on which one 
day he perched my brother, afterwards Dr. Tuck- 
well, then, like the hero of " Boots at the Swan," a 
"very little boy," and trotted him round the hall. 
Amongst the Fellows too was Isaac Williams, 
whose project of "Tracts for the Times," hatched 
with Hurrell Froude under the trees in Trinity 
Garden, brought Newman back from Italy and 
began the Oxford Movement. Williams came up 
from Harrow with the reputation of a finished 
Latin scholar, and won the Latin Verse, "Ars 
Geologica," in 1823. W. G. Cole used to relate 






TRINITY 225 

that, being Pro-proctor in this year, and keeping 
one of the Theatre gates at Commemoration, he 
was annoyed by the pertinacity of a stranger, 
who insisted on taking the place by storm. Cole 
gripped him, and asked his name. " My name is 
Williams, sir ; my son has a Prize, and I want to 
hear him recite his poem." Of course Cole passed 
him in. Double honours were expected for Isaac ; 
but his health broke down, and by Abernethy's 
order he was contented with a Pass; recovering, 
however, to obtain a Trinity Fellowship. He was, 
under the signature f, one of the six writers in the 
" Lyra Apostolica," and was the author also of 
Tract 80, on " Reserve in Religious Teaching." I 
well remember the exciting contest between him 
and Garbett for the Poetry Professorship in 1841-2. 
No one denied that he was the better man ; but an 
unwise circular of Pusey's, provoking a dexterous 
response from Gilbert, gave a theological character 
to the election. The commotion spread far and 
wide ; the London papers took it up, ranging 
themselves on what was now first called the "Anti- 
Tractarian " side. The silent but growing alarm 
excited by the Tracts found expression in support 
of Garbett, and a comparison of promised votes 
showing Williams to be in the minority, he with- 
drew, married soon after, and left Oxford. A story 
was told of him later, for the correctness of which 
I do not vouch. He had an unaccountable anti- 
pathy to Jews, and resented the Hebrew Christian 
name which his sponsors had inflicted on him ; his 
children, at any rate, should bear homely modern 
prcenomina, A son was born to him, John Keble 

P 



226 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

was its godfather, and it was baptized John Edward. 
Nothing, he thought, could be more free from an 
Israelite taint, though in the first name misgivings 
might have lurked ; until, too late, he discovered 
that the child's initials would be J. E. W. His 
autobiography, published after his death, throws a 
curious sidelight on Newman's character, not found 
in any other notice of the " Movement." He was a 
humble, self-distrusting, saintly being, cast in the 
Keble, not the Newman, type. Of his numerous 
works in prose and poetry it is likely that one alone 
will survive, his "Gospel Narrative of our Lord's 
Passion." In the "Cathedral," the "Christian 
Scholar," above all in the " Baptistery," are strains 
of genuine poetry, yet for the most part careless 
in structure and lacking condensation ; but the 
tenderness, scriptural insight, infusion with the 
best patristic feeling, of the " Passion " seems to 
me to leave far behind all other English devotional 
commentaries. 

"Monsignor" Patterson, who left us absquatu- 
lated, as Manuel Johnson used to say with 
Manning and others in the second Hegira, was a 
man learned, genial, musical, and a charming talker. 
I recall his enraptured face once in New College 
chapel, when the choristers, at all times cantare 
pares, were led by Miss Hawes, a London vocalist 
who had come down for an Oxford concert, and 
who, attending chapel, added her fine soprano to 
the music. He used to give evening parties in his 
rooms, to which his friends were warned to bring 
only " men as can talk and men as can sing," so he 
used to put it. Some years later I met him in 






TRINITY 227 

Dublin ; and was touched as I have often been 
in company with Newman's fugitives, by his 
pathetically eager recurrence, as of a homesick 
exile, to Oxford memories and names and incidents. 
I cannot myself, even now, without a pang recall 
that ancient time. These men were for the most 
part the flower of the Anglican as of the Oxford 
flock; none can estimate their loss to the University, 
to the Church, to the community ; and, through 
the consequent narrowing of their careers, to them- 
selves. Men of piety, intellect, note, remained ; 
but the heart had gone out of the Movement ; it 
declined, as Liddon used sadly to acknowledge 
and bewail, from aspirations to observances : its 
beneficent constructive side, its exuberant energy, 
unworldly mysticism, studious enthusiasm, leisured 
erudition, passionate self-devotion, passed into 
channels not shaped and not available for their 
distribution. In religion as in politics, the pos- 
session of commanding influence is a fearful gift. 
" Bad men," says a great satirist, " are bad, do the 
bad, go to the bad ; but who shall measure the 
abiding mischief which a very good man can do ? " 
Residents at Oxford in the later Forties were 
frequently aware of a very good-looking junior Don 
taking his walks abroad with young Lord Robert 
Cecil, Lord Lothian, his brother Schomberg, and 
others of ihejeunesse surdoree } who apparently looked 
up to him as guide, philosopher, and friend. It was 
Frederick Meyrick, a lately elected Fellow of Trinity. 
We thought that a man starting with qualifica- 
tions so marked, academic, social, personal, must 
become a shining University light : but he married, 



228 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

became a School Inspector, for a time disappeared, 
then suddenly came into notice during the horrida 
bella between Newman and Charles Kingsley, as 
author of a pamphlet bearing the cumbrous title 
"But isn't Kingsley right after all ?" It was a 
rather vigorous production, touching with an 
Ithuriel spear of common sense Newman's dex- 
terous subterfuge and Kingsley's bungling in- 
competence ; and it won Gladstone's admiring 
approbation. It had no effect upon the public 
mind ; men could not all appreciate reasoning ; 
they could all enjoy the "Apologia" to which the 
controversy gave rise. Kingsley was entirely dis- 
credited, and for several years the sale of his books 

fell off. 

Exchanging his School Inspectorship for a living, 
Meyrick devoted himself to theological controversy. 
More than fifty pamphlets stand against his name 
in the British Museum Catalogue : he contributed 
also to countless " religious " Journals, and edited 
seventeenth century Treatises. A wide traveller, 
an accomplished linguist, a practised disputant, he 
wrote on the Church of Spain, on the morality of 
Liguori, on Italian clerical legends, on Vaticanism, 
on Irish Church Missions. He was a friend and 
supporter of Dollinger, a vehement opponent of 
Manning, of Huxley, of Pattison, of Jowett. 

How could such a man escape promotion ? His 
youthful friend, afterwards Lord Salisbury, quar- 
relled with him when in 1865 he voted for Gladstone 
at Oxford, and his displeasure was possibly perma- 
nent. But what was Gladstone about, in his numerous 
Episcopal creations, to pass over a man so like- 



TRINITY 129 

minded, so active, and above all so safe ? Perhaps 
it was as well for Meyrick : endowment with mitral 
consequence might not have compensated for de- 
terioration of moral fibre : anyhow, he remained 
Vicar of Blickling till his death. Dignified, learned, 
pious, with high College honours and good social 
position, he preserved the old type of humanistic 
University training in the past. Intransigent in 
youth, and sturdy to the end, he remained through 
life a faithful champion of lost and losing causes. 
Respecting his fidelity to convictions which he had 
not idly formed, we appreciate him as type of a class 
essential probably to the progressive development 
of its time, extinct and perhaps impossible to-day. 

But the prominent representive of Trinity irH 
those days was its Vice- President, " Tommy " Short, 
who had been College Tutor when the century was 
in its teens, and was to continue lecturing into the 
late Sixties. He knew his books by heart, expound- 
ing them with fluency and humour ; he ranked 
with the best Oxford whist-players, and kept a 
spacious cellar of old port wine, including, I re- 
member, a pipe which he had bought from a 
Dissenting wine merchant, and labelled " Schismatic 
Binn." But he was especially notable as a con- 
versationalist, the last, perhaps, to represent the 
colloquial felicities which constituted a fine art in 
Oxford once, and are to-day recalled sadly as a lost 
art by superannuates like myself. Talk such as his 
can hardly be reproduced ; unforced, condensed, 
epigrammatic, crisp, yet at the same time voluble, it 
becomes vapid when severed from its a propos, 
loses point unless verbally repeated ; lacks above all *' 



230 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

the twinkling eye and incisive nasal tones of its 
^originator. Yet some of his sayings I remember, 
and his friend Dr. Plutnmer has kindly furnished 
me with not a few besides. Once, when I breakfasted 
in his rooms with Walter Thursby, known after- 
wards as the first Englishman to reach the summit 
of Mount Ararat, he told us that, examining in the 
Schools the day before, he had asked what mention 
is made of Marriage in the Articles ; to which the 
scholar "answered briskly, that it is a fond thing 
vainly invented, without any warrant either in 
antiquity or Scripture." This scaling of Ararat, by- 
the-bye, attracted much attention at the time. 
Thursby, who had just taken his degree, was travel- 
ling with another Trinity man, "white" Theobald 
he was called ; and though not practised climbers, 
they successfully assailed the biblical height. They 
found the snow in favourable condition, and the 
infames scopulos undeserving of their bad repute ; 
but the marauding tribes haunting the hillside 
rendered necessary a guard of Kurdish soldiers. 
" I understand," said Arthur Ridding, when in New 
College Common Room they told the story of their 
exploit ; " I understand, you took some Curds with 
you to show the whey." 

I return to dear old Short. Cole of Worcester 
" Papirius Carbo," Short always called him went 
to Short before taking his degree to read aloud the 
Articles, as was then customary. While he read, 
Short moved about apparently unheeding, arranged 
papers and gave instructions to his scout. But he 
was not inattentive ; when Cole read from the 
Article on the Old Testament about the "com- 



TRINITY 231 

mandments which are called moral," Short stopped 
him to inquire which were the commandments 
called immoral. He held together with his Fellow- 
ship the cure of St. Nicholas, Abingdon. Sanday of 
Trinity took the duty one day, and came to him for 
instructions. Said Short, " I feed my flock with hay 
and straw (prayers and sermon) in the morning, 
hay only in the afternoon." He used to dine and 
play a rubber at a house near Oxford. He sat next 
to a learned lady, whom he knew to be well on the 
further side of fifty. " Pray, Mr. Short," she said, 
" when does the human mind reach maturity ? " He 
answered, " Aristotle says, at forty-nine ; and what 
a blue you will be when you reach that age." 
Arriving late at the same house, he learned that the 
famous preacher Hugh M'Neile had unexpectedly 
come upon a visit, and that whist was to be sup- 
planted by a Scripture reading and exposition. 
Very cross, he sat to endure. Boanerges read a 
passage from the Acts: "They knew that the 

island was called Mellta." "The d they did!" 

was heard from Short's corner. Dining at another 
hospitable house, he became sleepy, and let the 
decanters pass. " Mr. Short," his host remon- 
strated, " that is Comet Port." [The Comet year, 
1811, yielded the finest vintage of the century.] 
" Oh, is it ? then, comitatis causa, I will take a 
glass." When Goulburn, Head Master of Rugby, 
was expecting the deanery of Exeter, Otter of 
Corpus naughtily proposed to insert his biography 
in The Times, specifying the number of boys he 
found at the school, and the loss which his reign 
had caused. " No," said Short, " that would not be 



232 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

biography, but boyography." Himself a Master at 
Rugby under Dr. Wooll, Arnold's predecessor, he 
was asked by Lord Lyttelton, Rugbean and a Trustee, 
to furnish a motto for the flogging school. " Great 
cry and little Wooll/' was the answer : Wooll was 
a diminutive man. Short used to say that at 
Rugby and at Oxford he had been concerned with 
more than a thousand pupils ; and that for every 
one foolish boy he had found two foolish parents. 
The school physician of his time, a Dr. Bucknill, 
known as " Hip-Hip Bucknill," was a Character. 
A boy was ill, and to Rugby came the mother in 
alarm. "Doctor, is there any danger ?" " There 
is always danger when there is illness." "But can 
you do anything for him ? " "I can't say, Take up 
your bed and walk." " No, but, Doctor, do tell me 
how he really is; my husband is so very anxious that 
I should return to him." if So should I be, madam, 
were I your husband." 

"Tommy" Sheppard of Exeter used to ride 

with Miss Susan . Near Godstow one day 

his horse jibbed and threw him into the water. 
While the lady sat in her saddle and laughed at 
his struggles to scramble out, Short passed by. 
He stopped, and said, "This time the elder is in 
the water, and Susanna is looking at him." When 
in his younger days the College living of Oddington 
fell, Miss Lee, the President's daughter, asked him 
whether he meant to take it. " Will you go with 
me?" "No." "Then I shall not take it; but 
you can't say you never had an offer." When 
eleven years later Rotherfield Grays was vacant, 
the lady gave him, and herself, another chance, by 




TRINITY 233 

repeating the former question. " No," said Short, 
"as you wouldn't go with me to Oddington, I 
sha'n't go without you to Rotherfield Grays." 
Suffering from what Horace calls tumults in the 
stomach, he went to consult Jephson at Leam- 
ington. "Your colon is out of order." "So I 
guessed, but I want you to prevent it from coming 
to a full stop." Some one remarked that the child 
of two unusually ugly parents was a very pretty 
baby. " Then," said Short, " it must be a bastard 
on both sides." A scout was dismissed for inso- 
lence : he came to Short. " I never thought, Mr. 
Short, that you would take the bread out of a poor 
man's mouth." " I take the bread out of your 
louth ? why, you fool, you spat it out." When 
Plumptre became Vice-Chancellor in 1848, Short 
stopped him in the street. " Now, Master, you 
will have to sport a cassock. Make use of the 
opportunity to wear out your old pairs of black 
trousers." His own were sometimes shrunken. 
Crossing the Quad, he overheard two undergra- 
duates commenting on "the brevity of Tommy's 
trousers." " Yes, you young jackanapes, Tommy's 
trousers are like you, they want taking down and 
strapping." He rebuked a youngster for smoking 
a regalia in the High Street. "Please, Mr. Short, 
how did you know it was a regalia ? " " Young 
man, it is the business of a Tutor to know all 
wickedness and practise none." A Trinity Scholar 
who got only a Second Class wrote to Short that 
he feared it was his duty to resign his Scholarship. 

" Take my compliments to Mr. ," Short said 

to his scout, "and tell him that if he comes 



234 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

into chapel without a surplice I shall fine him a 
pound." Only Fellows and Scholars wore sur- 
plices. Another repartee is somewhat grim, but 
too characteristic to be omitted. An under- 
graduate had debauched a girl in humble life, 
was penitent, wished to marry her, and with 
singularly bad judgment consulted Short. 

" Cato's a proper person to entrust 
A love-tale with ; " 

" if you marry her," said his oracle, " you are a 
fool ; if you don't marry her, you are a black- 
guard ; in either case you will cease to be a 
member of this College." 

Short had a horror of fasting, as ruinous to 
health. " I remember not many years ago when 
there were eighteen Tractarian undergraduates in 
this College. I threw not only cold water, but 
dirty water, on their ascetic practices, and they 
mostly discontinued them." And he used to tell 
how Newman's failure in the Schools was due to 
an idea he had taken up, that the more he re- 
duced his body the better his mind would work. 
He went in half-starved, and broke down right 
and left. He had not even read the Third Book of 
Aldrich, and knew next to nothing of the ALneid, 
while his Mathematical Papers, Ben Symons told 
Short, were scrawled over unintelligibly ; one pro- 
blem, however, being worked out with remarkable 
ingenuity. The marvel was that the examiners 
passed him at all ; they placed him as low as 
they could, in the Second Division of the Second 
Class, " under the line," as it was then contemptu- 



TRINITY 235 

ously called. " My nerves forsook me, and I 
failed," was his own account of the disaster in 
writing home. It was a severe blow to his Oxford * 
friends, who had calculated with certainty on his 
obtaining the highest honours ; and they were 
hardly less startled when only a year afterwards 
he stood for an Oriel Fellowship, at that time 
the blue ribbon of University distinction. The 
moment was singularly unpropitious ; in the pre- 
ceding year Oriel, which prided itself on electing 
its Fellows according to their prowess and promise 
in the examination rather than by their previous 
exploits in the Schools, had chosen a Second Class 
man, C. J. Plumer, over the head of a First Class 
man, George Howard, afterwards Lord Morpeth ; 
and had been savagely attacked in the Edinburgh 
Review (by the unsuccessful candidate, as Cople- 
ston discovered) for preferring mediocrity to excel- 
lence. Copleston and his Fellows could afford to 
ignore the censure, yet it must tend to make them 
wary ; and their selection of a man whose failure 
was notorious and recent might seem to justify* 
the vilipendings of the Edinburgh. Short, how- 
ever, who knew what was in his pupil, pressed 
Newman to stand ; he might not succeed, but he 
would show his power, and retrieve the last year's 
collapse. Thus fortified, Newman offered himself. 
"He came to me," Short said, "after the first 
paper, which was an Essay, and said that he had 
made of it a complete mess had broken down 
entirely. Now I had just seen Tyler, one of the 
Fellows, who said, ' Tell me something about your 
man Newman ; his is by far the best Essay we 



236 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

have had.' Of course I did not tell this to New- 
man, but I said to him, ' You go on with the exa- 
mination, and work through as if you had no 
chance and were only an unconcerned spec- 
tator.' ' Short was lunching at the time, and, 
like the judicious angel visitant to Elijah, made 
his emaciated pupil eat and drink " Arise and 
eat, for the journey is too long for thee" send- 
ing him away strengthened in mind as well as 
body by a plentiful and savoury meal. It was 
an object of great importance to Newman at that 
time to obtain a Fellowship, for his father, a 
brewer at Alton, had failed. While the examina- 
tion was proceeding, Short had occasion to call 
on Copleston, and took the opportunity of telling 
him that Newman was a highly deserving man, 
and that the circumstances of his family were 
such as to make a Fellowship very desirable. 
The Provost thanked him for the information, 
saying that such considerations were not alto- 
gether without weight in their elections. On the 
next day Short went into the country ; riding 
back to Oxford soon afterwards, he stopped at 
Shipstone to bait his horse, and taking up an 
Oxford paper read, " Yesterday Mr. John Henry 
Newman of Trinity College was elected Fellow of 
Oriel." When asked about his old pupil in later 
days, he used to say, " Newman was a very 
amenable fellow ; he did jib occasionally, but we 
all liked him very much. He was a wonderful 
divine in his undergraduate days. I can remember 
his bringing the Book of Psalms into Collections, 
and when we asked him to name the prophetical 



TRINITY 237 

psalms, he started with the second, and went 
through them all. Oh dear ! he used to run you 
down with his answers. He played the violin, 
too, very well, and often took a part in quartetts 
at President Lee's musical parties." Short himself 
was musical. I recall him one evening in Dr. 
Bliss's drawing-room, to which he came attired in 
black pantaloons, grey silk stockings, and silver- 
buckled shoes, sitting cross-legged at the feet of 
Mrs. Wingfield, an accomplished pianist, and re- 
proaching her because she played only modern 
music. The lady pleaded that the age was tired 
of the old music. " Correct the age," he answered 
in his nasal tones, and his friend, moving to the 
piano, played for him a fine piece by Scarlatti. 

Once only after Newman's secession he and 
Short met, when the Cardinal visited Oxford in 
1878, and dined at Trinity high table on February 
27. Short was too feeble to go into Hall, but 
Newman went to his rooms. " I asked him 
whether he remembered lunching with me during 
the Oriel Examination. 'Yes,' he said, 'and I 
remember what you had for luncheon ; it was lamb 
cutlets and fried parsley.' ' This pleased Short 
much, and the two agreed that Short had in- 
fluenced Newman's life more than any man ; since, 
but for Short, Newman would have retired from 
the examination, while success in that formed the 
foundation of his whole career. Until his own 
death Newman said a mass for Short every year. 

A touch of soberness falls upon the old Vice- 
President's closing days. He became blind to- 
wards the end, and was led about the streets. 




238 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Returning once to Oxford after years of absence, 
and meeting him in the Turl, I stopped him. 
" My father's son must shake you by the hand." 
Who is it?" "Tuckwell." "Which of them?" 
"The eldest." "Oh yes, the Master of Taunton 
school. Well, now, remember that what TroXvirpay- 
is to men of business, that is 770X^X07- 
to a schoolmaster." I thought of a printer's 
error which made Moberly miserable in a pub- 
lished sermon preached by him at St. Mary's just 
before going to Winchester, whereby the sentence, 
<<We must revive our flagging energies," became, 
rather too appropriately, "We must revive our 
flogging energies." T. L. Claughton used to relate 
that after becoming Bishop of Rochester he met 
Short one day at the President's. After dinner the 
two strolled in the garden, and as soon as they were 
screened from the windows Short went down on 
his knees, and said, " Claughton, give me your 
blessing." " I was very much moved," said 
Claughton, telling the story afterwards to Dr. 
Plummer. To the same old friend Short said once, 
"College rooms are very good to live in, but very 
bad to die in." He died, not in College, but some- 
where near Birmingham, in 1879. Deus sit pro- 
pitius huic potatori ! 



CHAPTER XIV 

CORPUS 

" The Pelican kindly for her tender brood 
Tears her own bowels^ trilleth out her blood 
To heal her young: and in a wondrous sort 
Unto her children doth her life disport. 
A type of Christ, who, sin-thralled man to free, 
Became a captive, and on shamefiil Tree 
Self-guiltless shed his blood, by*s wounds to save us t 
And heal the wounds th? old serpent firstly gave us. 
And so became of meer immortal mortal 
Thereby to make frail mortal man immortal" 

SYLVESTER'S Du Bartas. 

Bridges Greswell Otter Hext Coxe Vaughan Thomas 
Blackstone Furneaux Tom Faussett. 

OF two Corpus men, amusing lunatics both, Frowd 
and Holme, I made mention on page 27 ; but my 
memory, stimulated by an old friend, Professor 
H. A. Strong, himself in former days a Scholar, has 
brought before me a further file of worthies from the 
College of the Pelican. 

I remember old President Bridges ; his little 
daughter was my playfellow. Bridges, the Fellow 
of Corpus, was his nephew. He was a Wykehamist, 
and had left behind him amongst the Juniors a rather 
awful memory. He was a keen cricketer, and used 
to question me about the College and Commoner 
matches. He gave me the original MS. scores of the 

first matches played at Lords between Winchester 

239 



2 4 o REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

and Harrow. I presented them to T. W. Erie, 
afterwards Associate in Common Pleas. Bridges 
Bridger the boys called him went to the Bar, and 
became Attorney General at Hong-Kong. He was 
very deeply marked with small-pox : when news 
reached us of his marriage, Arthur Ridding re- 
marked that the lady ought to be pitied. 

When Dr. Bridges died, the Headship was offered 
to Greswell. Tommy Greswell he was called : his 
name was Edward, but the men had re-christened 
him, as the children re-christened the pig in "The 
Golden Age." He was a walking library of re- 
condite classics ; Macmullen in one generation, 
Furneaux in another, used to draw him out. 
Once in his life he was recorded to have made a 
joke. There was a Gentleman Commoner named 
Meiklam. Called on by the President at Col- 
lections, where it was certain that he would do his 
Tutors no credit, Greswell said " Please, Mr. 
President, leave him to us Nos humilem feriemus 
agnam ; We will smite the meek lamb." On his 
refusal of the Headship Norris was elected Pre- 
sident, "a little round fat oily man of God," who 
kept hunters. Nimrod, in his "Condition of 
Hunters," mentions the high condition in which 
Norris' horses were kept. He used to dine with 
us at New College sometimes, when special 
Caecuban was brought out from the College cellars. 
On becoming President he gave up hunting and 
sold his horses ; his groom came into Quad sob- 
bing out " I never thought to live to see my 
master made into an old woman." 

Francis Otter, one of the Fellows, who sat for 



CORPUS 241 

the Louth Division of Lincolnshire during the 
Short Parliament, and who married the sister of 
George Eliot's husband, Mr. Gross, once asked 
him, as Burgon asked Routh, for a word of wisdom 
which might be to him a maxim and a guide in the 
change and chance of life. " I will give you two 
such, my young friend," said Norris. " First, never 
make an enemy ; and secondly never be drawn 
into a correspondence." 

Otter was famous during the Secession War for 
his advocacy of the North. It used to be said then 
that the North had only three champions in Eng- 
land, Queen Victoria, the Duke of Argyle, and the 
Spectator newspaper. Otter made a fourth. The 
Spectator was so unpopular for its advocacy that 
it lost nearly all its subscribers, but the circulation 
more than recovered itself after the war. Otter 
took the chair at a great meeting where I spoke 
for him at Sleaford in 1890. He talked about the 
Roman Empire, and never touched his audience. 
I heard an important land-agent say, "We don't 
want a d d Tutor to represent us." 

The bestknown Corpus Tutor of my time was Hext. 
From a letter which he wrote to me when my book 
came out, mentioning him as it did in connection 
with Dr. Frowd, I transcribe the biographical part: 
" . . . the pleasure you have given me in reviving 
so many of my reminiscences, which with age are 
beginning to escape me. In 1836 I got a Scholar- 
ship at Corpus, resided till 1858, and then for thirty 
years never I believe missed a year to look up old 
friends for a few days. Alas ! they are getting 
scarce now. ... I treasured Lord Exmouth's port 



242 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

wine as Frowd had done, never using it but when 
old Oxford friends came to visit me, opening the 
last bottle for Evans of Pembroke in 1873. My 
last visit to Oxford was I think in 1897, to an 'old 
Corpus ' dinner, when I stayed with Furneaux, and 
met a grand gathering of old friends, most of whom 
I had not seen for forty or fifty years. I fear I 
shall never see Oxford again. In 1896 I con- 
tributed an article to the Pelican Record, on 
' Memories of Corpus boating/ in which I gave an 
account of the seven-oar race, much like your own. 
Two of the crew, George Hughes and Mackay, 
were pupils of mine at the time. 

" My dearest friend of all time was Harry Coxe. 
I gave Burgon a few lines about him for his twelve 
good men. I don't think I have any old friends sur- 
viving in Oxford except Chase. I see William Ogle 
occasionally in London. The rest I think are gone. 

" I am now retired ; gave up my Corpus Living 
in 1899, and am at last feeling my age. Once more 
thank you for your Reminiscences : I remember 
your father well, but I never knew you I'm afraid." 

He knew me across the examination table in the 
Schools. I remember him examining me in the 
Ethics for Greats in 1852. I knew it " in parts " I 
forbear the obvious quotation and Karslake of 
Merton my Tutor had imparted to me a variety of 
dodges by which an Examiner testing one in a 
weak place might be diverted on to stronger 
ground. Karslake came in to hear my Viva Voce; 
and on my adroitly and successfully practising 
his lesson, laughed audibly, and made me smile. 
Little Hext glared suspiciously ; and I was obliged 



CORPUS 243 

to look serious, a feat which I achieved without 
difficulty on his asking me a question which I 
could not answer. He next took me in Horace ; 
set me on, as I thought, in Satire IX., and I glee- 
fully turned to the Ibam forte. He corrected me 
again suspiciously : " I asked for the 9th Epistle. 1 ' 
But I knew by heart Steele's fine translation of the 
Septimius missive in the Spectator, and restored 
him to good humour. His letter was written in 
1901, when he was eighty-six years old. He died 
in the same year. 

His friend Henry Coxe was Chaplain at Corpus 
in those days ; famous for the pace at which he 
took the prayers : in amusing contrast to the slow 
measured reading of President Norris. He was 
the best mimic I ever met. I once wanted to see 
Dr. Wolff, the Bokhara missionary and savant ; 
sought him in the Bodleian, and asked Coxe if he 
was there. Instantly Coxe's handsome face was 
distorted into Wolff's grotesque phiz, his fingers 
wreathed themselves in strange twitchings, and 
Wolff's cavernous voice ascended from his chest. 
At that moment Wolff himself emerged from one 
of the cells ; gesticulations, face, voice, so exactly 
as Coxe had rendered them, that I was fain to 
turn away. He used to render dialogues between 
old Routh and Burgon ; Burgon's piping voice 
and gushing manner set off by the old President's 
sedate, soft, measured, half querulous, half sar- 
castic tones. 

Another notable Corpus Chaplain, formerly a 
Fellow, was Vaughan Thomas, tall, white-haired, 
red-faced, with sonorous voice. He was the last 






244 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

survivor amongst the men to whom Latin was 
a mother tongue, pouring forth orations voluble 
and unprepared. He had been an active Uni- 
versity politican ; but through some offence given 
had taken his name off the books. He led the 
original " Hampden row," as it was called. The 
protesters against Hampden met in his rooms, 
and he delivered a fine Latin speech on the 
historic occasion when the Proctors non-placeted 
the decree against the Bampton Lectures. His 
wife was a Miss Williams, daughter to the Botanical 
professor, who lived in the house overlooking 
the Gardens at the High Street end of Rose 
Lane. He lived in Holywell Lodge ; but when 
his wife's sister died, moved into the vacated 
house. Miss Williams was a character. She in- 
habited on Sundays an unusually large pew in 
St. Peter's, which she would allow no one to 
share. Once, when some preacher drew a crowd, 
she came late to find her pew filled with under- 
graduates. I saw her stand at the door and motion 
them all out, then shut herself in. Vaughan Thomas 
used a large, old-fashioned, closed carriage, with a 
handsome pair of horses, in which he and his 
second wife "took the air" every day. But he 
was a strict observer of "the Sabbath," and on 
Sundays left his horses and coachman to their 
rest, driving to his small living near Oxford in 
one of May's two-horse flys. 

I well knew poor Charles Blackstone. His 
father held the New College living of Heckfield, 
and was an intimate friend of Dr. Arnold. He 
made a figure at the Union, speaking frequently, 



CORPUS 245 

and giving much time to the preparation of his 
speeches. He won the Newdigate in 1848 the sub- 
ject "Columbus," reciting his poem in the Theatre 
with great force amid loud applause. He was 
found by his scout one morning lying dead upon 
his sofa, a discharged pistol in his hand. The 
conjecture offered at the inquest, and accepted, 
was to the effect that he had been annoyed by 
a rat in his room, and had bought the pistol 
with intent to shoot it : had fallen asleep on his 
sofa overnight, and, waked by the rat, had some- 
how entangled the pistol in his dress and lodged 
the contents in himself. 

I come to Henry Furneaux, with whom I was 
intimate for nearly sixty years. We were juniors 
together at Winchester in 1842. He was then 
a very tiny boy, with a large head which used 
to hang on one side, and great round eyes like 
those with w r hich a hare gazes at you when you 
surprise it sitting in its form. He made fun of 
his diminutive stature, declaring that in a shower 
he could walk between the drops of rain and not 
get wet. His astonishing memory first showed 
itself in the summer of 1844, when he performed 
in " Standing Up," as it was called, the feat which 
I have elsewhere commemorated. Later, in the 
Sixth Form, it was customary in the weekly 
Horace lesson to construe the whole or part of 
a Satire or Epistle, then to say by heart what 
we had translated the week before. One day, 
our lesson opened at the Non quia Mczcenas, 
which we duly construed, and were prepared to 
say by heart the Brundusium diary which pre- 



246 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

cedes it. By mistake Moberly set Furneaux on 
at the piece just construed, which none of us 
had learned. He went merrily ahead, till Moberly, 
noting our amused remonstrant faces, saw his 
mistake, and stopped the performance, adding to 
Furneaux, after a pause, a few serious words as 
to the responsibility attaching to his remarkable 
talent. His forte at that time was original Latin 
Prose. Many of us were fluent Latinists, but he 
beat us all. Once a month or so we had to 
produce a Latin critique on some great classical 
work of poet, orator, historian : it must occupy 
twelve pages of a quarto manuscript book. But 
to our hardness of heart was accorded a blank 
margin, which lazy boys would sometimes extend 
till the composition was reduced to a series of 
slender strips. Furneaux, alone of us all, never 
deigned to employ any margin ; his twelve pages 
were all covered with black manuscript. His Latin 
Verse was not particularly good ; his English Verse 
execrable : I remember a poem which he wrote on 
Gothic Architecture, and which his co-mates cri- 
ticised so mercilessly that in a passion of tears he 
tore it up. I myself, in satira nimis acer, com- 
posed on the occasion a wicked lampoon : but he 
bore me no spite ; malice was not in his nature. 
Senior of the School, he fortunately did not 
go off to New College, the only two vacancies 
being annexed, according to the vicious practice 
of that day, by two Founders' kin much his 
juniors. I say fortunately ; for at that time New 
College absorbed the cream of Winchester and 
converted it into thinnest milk. He got his 



CORPUS 247 

Corpus Scholarship, his First Class, his Fellow- 
ship. It was as an undergraduate that he first 
showed his genius for story telling. He picked 
up and remembered every jeu d' esprit emitted by 
Thorold Rogers, Blaydes, Bartlett, Tom Faussett, 
and would retail them with contagious enjoyment 
of their fun. These passed away from him mostly 
in after life, until his memory was stirred ; then 
they all came back. In writing my Oxford book 
I once or twice applied to him to complete 
some squib of which I remembered only a line 
or two ; and with some effort he usually suc- 
ceeded. "You certainly are," he wrote to me, 
" a wonderful person for stimulating my recol- 
lection. The verses you want must have slum- 
bered in my memory for I know not how many 
years. In late years I have not heard of any 
good thing. I fear the art is extinct, the clever 
men being too serious, the others too stupid." 
The most wonderful of his stories was known as 
"The Cornish Jury." In a case of murder the 
jury had retired to consider their verdict; and 
at first beguiled the time with general talk, which 
Furneaux, a born Cornishman, rendered in the 
native dialect. Reminded at last by the Foreman 
that they must "come to a 'cision on this here 
case," the dikasts delivered their judgments in- 
dividually, each more amazing than his predeces- 
sors. I can recall them, but it would be useless 
to transcribe them : 

"Nam quamvis memori referao mihi pectore cuncta, 
Non ta g en interpres tantundem juveris ; adde 
Vultum habitumque hominis." 



248 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Mansel once tried to tell the story in my hearing ; 
he was a professed raconteur, but he murdered it 
dismally. 

Furneaux was for some years a School Exa- 
miner, but disliked the pressure which the task 
involved. " They bring you a haystack of Papers 
at 6 P.M. and expect the marks next morning." 
And, though a strenuous worker, he loved a 
leisurely dinner and a good night's rest. He 
abandoned the practice after a while : it had 
been, he said, "a youthful folly." He died in 
1900, in his seventy-first year. 

One old acquaintance more shall close my 
list, who, like the last, died, multis flebilis, before 
his time, Tom Faussett of Corpus. He held a 
close scholarship, confined to the county of Ox- 
ford. There was only one candidate besides, but 
as the senior boy at Winchester he was formid- 
able. I remember Faussett's glee when his rival 
withdrew, preferring unwisely to take his chance 
of New College. Unwisely because while New 
College was decadent, Corpus was a rising College. 
While at College Faussett was dexterous in epi- 
gram and parody ; he became afterwards an ex- 
ceptionally skilful writer of Latin poetry ; not the 
classical poetry of Lord Wellesley and Charles 
Wordsworth, but the riming mediaeval verse, now 
secular and humorous, now devotional, of Walter 
de Mapes or of the Paris Breviary. He was an 
unrivalled punster : his was the quatrain in Punch 
at which all England laughed, when in the Ashantee 
war King Coffee Calcalli fled from his burning 
capital 



CORPUS 249 

" Coomassie's town is burnt to dust, 

The King, escaped is he : 

So Ash-and-Coffee now remain 

Of what was Ash-an-tee." 

It is not so easy to pun in Latin ; but that too 
he habitually achieved. In some lines sent to 
Dean Alford at a time when stormy winds did 
blow he interjects the comment 

" Contra venti sunt brumales 
(Audin' quanta vox eis ? ), 
Si non cequinoctiales 
Saltern czque noxii" 

An accomplished lawyer and antiquary, he lived 
and died at Canterbury as Auditor to the Dean 
and Chapter; died at the early age of forty-eight. 
While he was an undergraduate, I had heard 
some one recite from a topical imitation of Gray's 
" Elegy/' which he ascribed to Faussett. The 
lines kept a hold on me, and ten years afterwards, 
meeting him in Oxford, I asked him for them. 
" I don't think a copy is extant," he said with 
astonishment. " I never even knew that F. had 
heard of them ; but that they should have reached 
you and remained in your memory is to me 
wonderful." He recalled and sent me the lines ; 
I reproduce them from his handwriting. It was 
a letter, written to an absentee comrade at the 
close of term. 

" Collections o'er the knell of closing term, 

The lower herd speed off with eager glee, 
The Dons too homeward trail their steps sedate, 
And leave the College to the scouts and me. 



250 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Now fades the last portmanteau on my view, 
And o'er the Quad a solemn stillness looms ; 

Save where young Furneaux coaching still resides, 
And mumbling pupils throng his distant rooms : 

Save that from yonder gloom-encircled lodge, 
The porter's boy doth to the porter moan 

Of such as issuing from the ancient gate 
Forget the usual terminal half-crown. 

Within that number two, that one pair left, 

Where heaves the wall with countless gold-framed views, 

All in his snug armchair in silence set, 

Your humble correspondent takes his snooze. 

The husky voice of dream-dissolving scout, 
The porter, summoning to the Dean's stern frown, 

The bell's shrill tocsin and the echoing clock 
No more disturb him from his morning's down. 

For him no more the social breakfast waits, 
Nor smiling Sankey boils the midnight brew, 

No mirthful Wadham scatters cheer around, 
No Blaydes applauds the long-divided crew. 

Oft did blue devils 'neath their influence fly, 
Their laughter oft his stubborn moods dispelled, 

How jovial did they chaff the term away, 

How the Quad echoed as their sides they held ! 

Ah ! let not Christchurch mock their simple life, 
Their homelier joys and less expensive cares, 

Nor Merton gaze with a disdainful smile 
On fun too intellectual to be theirs. 

The glare of bran new pinks, the pomp of teams, 
The tuft-hunter's success, the gambler's luck, 

Alike upon a slippery basis stand ; 

A course too rapid endeth in a " muck." 



CORPUS 251 

Nor you, ye swells, impute to us a fault 
In fame and memory if to you we yield, 

If ours no vulpine brush, no argent vase, 
Proclaim as victors of the flood and field. 

Can storied urns or animated " busts " ] 
Bribe back the mucker which has once been run ; 

Can knocker wrenched allay proctorial ire, 
Or tails of vermin soothe a clamorous dun ? 

Yet know, in this our quiet spot have lived 

Hearts close united by affection's tie, 
Wit that might shine in Courts as well as Quads, 

And social virtues with which few can vie. 

Their names, their deeds, writ in tradition's page, 
Shall sound eternised by her Muse's lyre, 

Freshmen to come the fond record shall trace, 

Rejoice in youth, like them, like them in age aspire." 

1 Bust slang for a breakdown in character and career, 
synonymous with "mucker," then first coming into use. 



CHAPTER XV 

PATTISON, MAURICE, THOMSON, GOULBURN 
WILLIAM SEWELL 

" Hast thou seen higher, holier things than these, 
And therefore must to these refuse thy heart? 
With the true Best, alack, how ill agrees 

That best that thou ivouldst choose. 
The Summum Pulchrum rests in heaven above ; 

Do thou as best thou may'st, thy duty do : 
Amid the things allowed thee live and love : 
Same day thou shalt it view."" 

CLOUGH. 

A Contrast to Jowett Mark Pattison's Character land Career A 
Sceptic And a Cynic Omni-erudition His Talk of Books 
The Optimist and the Pessimist Maurice Archbishop Thomson 
Provost of Queen's Oxford Preachers Early Recollections 
Denison Hamilton Adams Goulburn Goulburn at Rugby 
A Mediaeval Saint Dean of Norwich William Sewell More 
Puseyite than Pusey His Emotional Theology His Quaint Lec- 
tures His Translation of Horace An Epidemic of High Church 
Novelettes " Amy Herbert " " Hawkstone" St. Columba's 
College Singleton Radley. 

THERE remain some viri illustres whom I knew, 
and of whom I have words to say. First of these 
comes Mark Pattison. To bracket him with Jowett, 
as is often done, shows superficial knowledge of 
the pair. Both, no doubt, were clergymen, both 
missed disappointingly and afterwards exultingly 
obtained the Headship of their Colleges, both 
wrote in " Essays and Reviews." Behind these 

accidents are life equipment, experiences, char- 

252 




MARK PATTISON 

From a Portrait in the possession of Miss Stirke 



ar.tf rs 



PATTISON AND OTHERS 253 

acters, temperaments, standing in phenomenal 
contrast. Pattison's mind was the more com- 
prehensive, instructed, idealistic, its evolution as 
intermittent and self-torturing as Jowett's was con- 
tinuous and tranquil. Pattison's life, in its abrupt 
precipitations and untoward straits, resembled the 
mountain brook of Wordsworth's Solitary ; Jowett's 
floated even, strong, and full, from the winning 
of the Balliol scholarship by the little white-haired 
lad with shrill voice and cherub face, until the 
Sunday afternoon at Headley Park, when the old 
man, shrill, white-haired, and cherubic still, bade 
" farewell to the College," turned his face to the 
wall, and died. 

To a College whose tutors were inefficient and 
its scholars healthy animals Pattison carried at 
eighteen years old a mass of undigested reading, 
an intelligence half awakened, a morbid self-con- 
sciousness, a total want of the propriety and tact 
which a public school instils, but in which home 
training usually fails. Slowly there dawned in him 
the idea of intellectual life, the desire to amass 
learning for the rapture of acquiring it ; and to his 
mental development, with all its aberrations, this 
idea gave lasting unity. It was broken for a time 
by Newman's influence, which swept him into the 
Tractarian whirlpool, arrested the growth of his 
understanding, diverted him from scholarahip to 
theology ; the reaction which followed Newman's 
flight told on him with corresponding force. He 
had missed his First Class through going prema- 
turely into the Schools, and taking in fewer books 
than were required for the highest honours. The 



254 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Examiners had doomed him to a Third, when one 
of them, Hayward Cox, drew attention to his 
answers in the Logic and Moral Science Papers, 
which were gems of thought ; and prevailed on 
his colleagues to place him in the Second Class. 
He became Fellow of Lincoln, College Tutor and 
Examiner in the Schools, threw himself zealously 
into academic discipline and teaching, recovered 
the bodily health which High Church aw^a-nKj] 
<yv/j,vacria had impaired; was useful and ambitious 
and happy. The Headship of Lincoln fell vacant, 
and all looked to see him fill it all except a torpid 
and obstructive minority amongst the Fellows, 
affronted by the energy which put their somnolence 
to shame. Their intrigues succeeded, and he was 
defeated by Thompson, a man well acquainted 
with the College estates and business, but not 
comparable with Pattison in intellectual and teach- 
ing power. The disappointment paralysed him, 
and, broken-hearted, he resigned his Tutorship. 
Somewhat restored by two years of rambling, 
fishing, foreign travel, but an altered and embit- 
tered man, vindictive, melancholy, taciturn, he 
fell back on his old ideal of life the life of a 
student pure and simple, with no view to literary 
success, but, as before, for the joy which study 
brings. Thenceforth for thirty years, with one 
brief interruption, his life flowed in this single 
channel. He lived among his books, used his 
Headship, when it came to him, less in the interests 
of the College than to enlarge his library and his 
leisure; produced his monumental "Casaubon," 
outcome of twenty-five years' reading; flung off 




PATTISON AND OTHERS 255 

from his workshop the chips now mortised into 
his collected Essays ; died, multa gemens, as for 
his reft library, so most of all for this, that his 
"Life of Scaliger," conceived and shaped in 
memory and notes, must pass with him into the 
land where all things are forgotten. 

Such a life must needs write wrinkles, not only on 
cheek and brow, but on heart and brain : it left its 
mark on Pattison's. It left him sceptic. Puritanism, 
Anglicanism, Catholicism, had successively widened 
his religious conceptions, each in turn falling from 
him like a worn-out garment, till he became Pantheist 
on the positive side, negatively Agnostic. Religion 
he esteemed as a good servant but a bad master ; 
the idea of Deity, he told one of his querists, was 
"defaecated to a pure transparency." Faith he 
defined as ft belief in the unproved " ; and what he 
could not prove, that he would not believe. This 
discrepancy between esoteric conviction and pro- 
fessional status troubled him not at all. He acknow- 
ledged to Thorold Rogers, who had abandoned 
the Anglican ministry, his own disbelief in what 
those who hold them call the fundamental verities 
of Christianity ; but said that as a young man he 
had adopted in good faith the doctrines of the 
English Church, had shaped his life to meet its 
demands, was too old now to make a change injuri- 
ous to himself. It left him cynical. He declined 
to acknowledge the obligation of self-sacrifice ; pro- 
nounced Montaigne's dictum, that to abandon 
self-enjoyment in order to serve others is unnatural 
and wrong, "a refreshing passage"; quoted with 
approval Goethe's paradox, " I know not myself, 



256 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

and God forbid I ever should." In his sister Dora's 
heroism, which, in the light of Miss Lonsdale's book, 
all England honoured, he saw only self-glorification 
and misdirected energy. He lectured once at 
Birmingham while she was combating small-pox at 
Walsall : she came over to greet him, not having 
seen him for years. " What, Dora ! " was his only 
salutation, "still cutting off little Tommy's fingers 
and little Jemmy's toes ? " It left him pessimist. As 
student of history and politics he had seen one after 
another millennium prevented by the thwarting 
Spirit which, scevo Iceta negotio y loves unweariedly 
to spite humanity ; Hellenic civilisation in one 
century, "New Learning" in another, political 
reform in his younger days, social emancipation in 
his maturity. He refused to believe in the pro- 
gressive happiness of mankind, and laughed to scorn 
the amiable Tennysonian commonplace that good 
will be the final end of ill. It left him, happily, as 
it found him, a devotee of knowledge. He was as 
nearly ornni-erudite as man can be in omni-parient 
days : one who knew him well said of him that you 
may dig into any portion of his mind with certainty 
of turning up a nugget. In the book-lined gallery 
which opened out of his drawing-room he would 
sit or stand, in the short morning coat which he 
affected as a dinner dress, the centre of a group of 
guests, picked men from many walks of thought, 
scientist, aesthetic, literary : as each proffered his 
own patented topic Pattison would take it up and 
handle it with swift, clear, exhaustive analysis, 
ending always with an apologetic, " But, you know, 
it's not my subject." 



PATTISON 257 

What was his subject ? He ranked specially as 
an expert in moral philosophy, examining therein 
at one time for the India Civil Service. I asked 
him once about the relative merits of the candidates 
as belonging to different Universities. He said 
that the Oxford man, in shirt front, finger nails, 
costume generally, was a thing of beauty and 
knew nothing ; the Cantab, slightly dingy and 
knew something ; the Caledonian knew little about 
moral philosophy, much about the Scotchmen who 
had handled it ; the Dublin man was a boor in ex- 
ternals, but knew everything. Yet no one would 
venture to limit his speciality to philosophy. 
Apart from literature and philology, fresh chambers 
were ever opening to one's quest in the basement 
no less than in the higher stones of his mind. 
He had a Yorkshireman's love of horses, and 
cared to know who won the Derby. He narrowly 
missed the championship of croquet, and could 
diagnose the mental bias of the players round 
him by their methods and tactics in the game. In 
country walks he recognised the note of every 
bird, and knew or sought to know the name, habit, 
class, of every uncommon plant or hovering insect. 
His talk of books was musical in its luminous 
enthusiasm, and he read aloud the poetry he loved 
with rare felicity. As a young man he had written 
hymns for some of the minor Church festivals, but he 
never enjoyed religious poetry, and would pitilessly 
dissect the 97^09 and the diction of the " Christian 
Year." He cared little for Tennyson or Brown- 
ing, though he joined the Browning Society, and 
once gave a characteristic address on " James Lee's 



258 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Wife." Towards Milton he felt as a scholiast rather 
than as a worshipper. Pope always appealed to 
him ; he recited his poetry with a relishing ccesuric 
swing, was proud of his own commentary on the 
" Essay/' furious at a stereotyped error in the notes 
which made him quote Milton's " Hymn on the 
Nativity " as " Ode to Nature." He greatly enjoyed 
Wordsworth in what he called his higher mood ; 
moral, that is, not lyrical or romantic. Amongst 
classic writers he placed ^schylus as unapproach- 
able. Anna Swanwick used to relate that she was 
reading alone in her drawing-room late one night, 
when there came a ring at the bell and Pattison 
walked in. "What is the finest poem in the 
world?" She hesitated. He answered, "The 
Agamemnon " ; turned on his heel, and disappeared. 
His favourite Latin poet was Virgil ; Gray, and 
perhaps Collins, he pronounced to be the only 
English poets rivalling the artistic melody of the 
Augustan age : he loved to read aloud the " Pro- 
gress of Poesy," as the finest classical ode in the 
language, always throwing away the book in anger 
before the copybook bathos of the closing lines. On 
his last night alive he desired to have read to him the 
"Ode on Eton College," commenting as he listened 
with all his old aptness, pregnancy, refinement. 

But man cannot live by literary enthusiasm 
alone ; and in Pattison's scheme of life there was 
a fatal flaw it lacked benevolence, participation, 
sympathy : 

" He did love Beauty only, Beauty seen 
In all varieties of form and mind, 
And Knowledge for its beauty ; " 






PATTISON 259 

and slighted Love avenged itself. His history 
incarnated the " Palace of Art " ; he built for 
himself a godlike life, but a life of godlike 
isolation ; and so the unseen hand wrote " Mene, 
Mene," on his palace walls, and the fruit which 
he plucked so laboriously from the ambrosial 
tree turned to an apple of Sodom at the last. 
He was, indeed, in all points the antithesis of 
Jowett. The one was idealist, the other prac- 
tical ; a Cynic the one, while the other was a 
Stoic. Pattison brooding, self-centred, morose ; 
Jowett sweet-blooded, altruistic, sociable; Jowett 
beamingly optimistic, Pattison pessimist to the 
core. To his old friend's deathbed, so the tale 
was current at the time, Jowett sent a farewell 
message : " You have seen so much good in the 
world that you may be hopeful of the future ! " 
" I have seen so much wrong in the world," 
snarled Diogenes from his pillow, "that I have 
no hope for the future ! " Sunt lacrymce ! Yet let 
us remember, while we emphasise the contrast, 
that to make allowance for the forces which 
disturb the moral pendulum heredity, constitu- 
tion, temperament, environage is outside our 
power and our scope. Here, as elsewhere, comes 
in the weighty " Judge not" of perfect insight 
and of perfect charity, hushing our presumptuous 
verdict, alike on the dejected and the buoyant 
character, alike on the auspicious and the hapless 
life, in the presence of the all-adjusting grave. 

My analysis of Mark Pattison's character in the 
" Reminiscences " brought me a deeply interesting 



260 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

letter from one of his few very intimate associates, 
who had been made conversant with the closing 
incidents of his life. After pleading that I must 
not take too literally his avowed contempt for 
Altruism, since his wife's well-known crusade on 
behalf of working women owed its initial energy 
to him, while to the last he freely gave both toil 
and money to the cause of higher female educa- 
tion, my correspondent proceeds : " Your portrait 
of the Rector is a very fine one ; but I could 
have given you hints which would have coloured 
your sketch, and rightly so, more to his mind. 
I mean his true mind ; his contempt for dulness 
often made him play tricks on stupid people. The 
last thing read to him was not, as you say, Gray's 
' Ode to Eton ' ; though that he frequently called 
for, but Horace's Archytas Ode, which was 
repeated by his wish over and over again. During 
the last hours he made his Apologia, which was, 
I believe, taken down by his wife, and is extant. 
It came to this, that his aim had been to live for 
knowledge ; knowledge not for its own sake, but 
for the joy of acquiring it. His first conception 
of this joy was given to him, he said, by Newman's 
writings ; though he had come to gain a truer view 
than did Newman of what knowledge really meant. 
You ought also to know the truth about Sister 
Dora. Like many brilliant hysterics, she was 
a born romancer, driven by the dramatic instinct 
to impress her company. This was so odious to 
the Rector, that he never changed his estimate 
of her. The family did change, when they found 
she had a following. I must add my admiration 



F. D. MAURICE 261 

of your masterly sketch; I appreciate the power 
of intellectual discrimination displayed in it." I 
quoted as original his saying that the idea of 
Deity was "defecated to a pure transparency." I 
have since found it as used originally by Coleridge, 
and applied by him not to the "idea of Deity/' but 
to "the mist that stands between God and thee," 
which after all comes to nearly the same thing. 

If Pattison and Jowett present a telling contrast, 
so do Maurice and Pusey : alike in spiritual fervour, 
occult influence, magical personality ; but origi- 
nating in very different impulses and ending in 
very different convictions. Pusey ascended to his 
mission from long deep theologic study ; Maurice 
came down to it from the top of Sinai, a prophet 
on fire with his message. Pusey's development 
from the Tractarian starting-point was intelligible 
and easily traced ; Maurice moved in a maze of 
contradictions and surprises. Though he hated 
controversy, his life was one long combat ; of 
large charity and deep humility, he tomahawked 
opponents with savage personal violence ; preach- 
ing Radical doctrines, he upheld aristocracy and 
feudalism ; was labelled Broad Church by all 
parties, while holding with devout acceptance the 
Prayer Book, Catechism, Thirty-Nine Articles, and 
Athanasian Creed. 

Maurice was cradled amid theological strife. His 
father was a Unitarian minister, his mother a 
Calvinist, one sister Anglican, another Baptist. The 
stern tradition of his home forbade the reading 
of fiction shut him out from all enjoyment of 



262 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

external nature ; it was an atmosphere of thin, cold 
thought, moral polemic, intellectual puzzlement. 
He emerged from it with one dominant desire, 
which shaped all his speculations and determined 
his ultimate belief a passionate longing for unity. 
At Cambridge his mind grew rapidly, under the 
genial tutorship of Julius Hare, the stimulating 
society of the " Apostles" above all, through close 
intimacy with Sterling. Refusing to purchase a 
Fellowship by conformity to the Church, he slipped 
away without a degree for a course of journalism 
in London, contributing to The Westminster 
Review, and for a time editing The Athenceum. Dis- 
turbed by mental anxieties and deeming his life a 
failure, he entered himself at Oxford, in the hope 
there to attain some moral and religious standpoint. 
I have told in another chapter (p. 89) how, during 
a walk with me through Oxford in the Fifties, the 
late Sir Thomas Acland, his lifelong and admiring 
friend, stopped before the Martyrs' door of St. 
Mary Magdalen Church, and said, "Twenty-five 
years ago Jacobson and I took F. D. Maurice in 
there to be baptized." He read desperately hard ; 
published a self-revealing novel, " Eustace Conway " ; 
was ordained to a country curacy ; became chaplain 
of Guy's Hospital ; and embodied the outcome of a 
ten years' mental struggle in his " Kingdom of 
Christ," that book which abides to-day a record of 
soul-building not less arresting to the psychologist 
than the apologies of the brothers Newman, ]. A. 
Froude, and Blanco White. His apprehension of 
God was intuitional. He would not see design in 
Nature, infer a Summun Pulchrum, deify the ideal 




F. D. MAURICE 263 

human self, accept an authoritative revelation : like 
a Hebrew prophet, he saw the Lord sitting on His 
throne. Possessed of, and hourly living in, this 
presence, he deduced from it his view of nature, of 
humanity, of life. With Augustine, he beheld a 
City of the World, a welter of individualism, 
inequality, competition, warfare, selfishness : be- 
held, too, a City of God, a universal spiritual 
society, attested in old experience, latent yet dis- 
cernible in mankind to-day. Behind the pageant 
of society, the rise and fall of nations, the jar of 
creeds, the tangle of contemporary politics, he saw 
the ever-advancing onset of spiritual energies, 
drawing men together by a comity of righteousness, 
wherein all bear others' burdens, finding each his 
own satisfaction in the satisfaction of all. And the 
constitution of this society was monarchic : it was 
not a mystical abstraction, but a visible kingdom, 
ruled by an ever-present King. He saw it in the 
Catholic Church, its gate of baptism, its Eucharistic 
guarantee, its witnessing Bible, its consummation in 
the Athanasian Trinity : found finally a crowning 
solecism and surprise to his admirer ]. S. Mill in 
the English Church a rock on which, after much 
tossing to and fro, he felt that he could rest. Yet 
with no party in that Church was he on consenting 
terms. He controverted Pusey's tract on baptism ; 
scoffed alike at the Low Church craving for 
personal salvation, the High Church academic and 
tradition-bound formality, the Broad Church 
independence of dogma. Their systems all began 
with man, his sinfulness, his needs, his aspirations ; 
Maurice's starting-point was God. The phrase may 



264 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

mean little or much : fully to appreciate its force 
and its clue to all his action we must read his 
writings. When once it is grasped, we can co- 
ordinate all his religious inconsistencies : the 
thwarting limitations and timidities which sorely 
tried his colleagues in the social crusade; his horror 
of democracy ; his shrinking from co-operative 
action ; his halting attitude towards Socialism ; his 
anti-Sabbatarianism; his historic denial of eternal 
punishment ; above all, his furious denunciation of 
Hansel's jaunty agnosticism, humorously char- 
acterised by one of his biographers as a theology 
of Caliban upon Setebos. 

One more factor in this strangely compounded 
nature must be taken into account the loathing 
of oppression which hurled him into every fray 
upon the weaker side ; against the tyranny of an un- 
reasoning majority, against unfair popular clamour, 
against the bray of the religious press, which he 
honoured with the most truculent of all his hatreds. 
He defended Ward in 1844 fought for Pusey 
against the Six Doctors, for Jowett against Pusey, 
for Colenso against Gray, for Bennett of St. 
Barnabas' against the Protestant mob. 

He lived an isolated life it was his prayer that 
he might do so and he left no followers. Yet, 
paradoxical and inconsequent as he often was, his 
message was the message of a prophet ; and as a 
prophet he was received by those who had ears 
to hear. "The greatest mind since Plato" was 
the judgment of Archdeacon Hare. Tennyson's 
admiring lines of tribute " break with the music 
of waves upon the Channel shore." "The most 



THOMSON 265 

beautiful human soul/' said Kingsley, who, after 
Sterling; knew and loved him best "the most 
beautiful human soul whom I have ever met with 
upon earth, of all men approaching nearest to my 
conception of St. John, the Apostle of Love." 

The "Essays and Reviews," with Stanley's tre- 
mendous article in the Edinburgh, provoked a 
counterblast of conservative theology, in a long- 
forgotten "Aids to Faith," edited by Archbishop 
Thomson, then Provost of Queen's, who had him- 
self, amusing to relate, written a paper which 
missed insertion in the famous volume only by 
being sent in too late. I knew him as a Fellow 
long before ; we were both on the committee of 
the "Amateur," and worked together at the pro- 
grammes. He was an enthusiastic musician, with 
a superb baritone voice ; no one who heard it will 
forget his singing of the "Boar's Head" chant at 
the Queen's College Christmas dinner. In his 
rooms I first received the idea of what came after- 
wards to be called " culture " ; his talk and the 
books which lay about giving outlook into a wider 
world than had dawned on the ordinary academic. 
Educated under Butler at Shrewsbury, he came 
up to Queen's in 1836, was idle, recovered himself, 
and became a Michel Fellow of the College. His 
line as a Tutor was philosophy ; his " Laws of 
Thought " was for many years a valued text-book. 
His Bampton Lectures on "The Atonement" 
passed into the limbo retained for these annual 
apologies of orthodoxy ; but his presentation to 
All Souls, Marylebone, enabled him to attract 
fashionable crowds, and made him known outside 



266 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

the University. During his residence in College 
Mr. and Mrs. Skene of Rubislaw, with their family, 
came to reside in Oxford. We had all read our 
Lockhart, and looked with deep interest on the 
white-haired laird, Walter Scott's lifelong friend, 
accomplished horseman, draughtsman, antiquarian, 
godfather to the Fourth Canto of " Marmion," 
to whom Scott owed the conception of the Jews 
in "Ivanhoe," and of "Quentin Durward." With 
them was a middle-aged daughter, who sang 
Handel finely and wrote religious novels, and two 
young grand-daughters, one pretty, the other 
clever : let me not be supposed to allege that the 
pretty sister was dull or the clever sister plain ; 
but so it was, that men used to manoeuvre at 
dinner-parties to take down the clever sister and 
sit opposite the pretty one. This last the " Greek 
Slave " she was called, her mother being a Levan- 
tine was soon surrounded by admirers ; from 
them she selected Thomson, and they were 
married on his appointment to the London living. 
In 1855 he was made Provost of Queen's. The 
election was decided by his vote in favour of him- 
self, and his right to take part in it, being a married 
Fellow in his year of grace, was challenged; but 
he persisted, and carried his point, not without 
abiding friction between himself and the dissenting 
electors. At Prince Albert's death his name was 
found prominent on the list of clergymen whom 
the Prince thought deserving of promotion, and 
he became at short intervals a Royal Chaplain, 
Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, Archbishop of 
York. The final nomination was said to have been 



THOMSON 



267 



a compromise between the Queen and the Prime 
Minister. She had marked her old friend Bishop 
Wilberforce for the see ; but Lord Palmerston, 
between whom and the Bishop there was constant 
feud, named VValdegrave of Carlisle; and, when 
neither would give way, threw upon the Queen 
the responsibility of making the appointment. 
She was at Coburg, and on receiving Palmerston's 
letter desired to have the names read over to her. 
Of several names she said tl No they will not do " : 
at the last, when Thomson's came, she said " Yes, 
let it be he ; the Prince always thought well of 
him." As Archbishop, Thomson hardly fulfilled 
the expectation which dictated and accompanied 
his rapid rise. Unpopular in London society, it 
was early understood that he would never succeed 
to the higher throne of Canterbury. This he had 
always expected would be his ; S. Wilberforce's 
diary notes on his non-appointment, " Thomson 
much disappointed." He preached, now and 
again, extraordinarily eloquent sermons : Dean 
Stanley, and Thompson, afterwards Master of 
Trinity, both noted discourses of his in West- 
minster Abbey as amongst the best which they 
had ever heard ; and his rare appearances on public 
platforms were marked by addresses of the very 
highest order ; but these efforts were isolated and 
eruptive ; so that, unquestionably in his own time 
the ablest prelate on the bench, he left no mark 
either on his Church or on the community. His 
presence was remarkably imposing, of great bulk 
and stature, with massive features, sonorous de- 
livery, dignified and stately manners. Imprudently 



268 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

exerting himself when unwell in a December 
Ordination, the action of his heart failed, and he 
died on Christmas Day, 1890. 

I have said nothing of the early parochial 
Oxford pulpits. At the opening of the Thirties 
Evangelicalism was dominant, trumpeted by a 
tremendous Boanerges named Bulteel, whose 
powerful but sulphurous sermons filled St. Ebbe's 
Church. He made a name for himself outside his 
squalid parish, attacked the Heads of Houses for 
sloth and unfaithfulness in a violent University 
sermon, whose impeachments they but feebly 
answered, practised faith healing successfully in 
cases where physicians were in vain, ministered in 
conventicles, found his licence revoked by Bishop 
Lloyd, whom he thereupon denounced publicly as 
" an officer of Antichrist," built a chapel of his own, 
and founded a not long-lived sect of Bulteelites. 
Reviving High Churchism first echoed in St. Peter's 
Church, about 1835, from the lips and practice of 
Edward Denison and his curate Walter Kerr 
Hamilton, both afterwards Bishops of Salisbury. 
I remember the beautiful old Norman edifice in my 
boyhood, neglected and dilapidated : I sat with my 
mother in a large, high, square pew, into which 
we locked ourselves on entering, and prayed for 
their most gracious Majesties King William and 
Queen Adelaide. A lady in the adjacent pew 
interested me always by turning eastward and 
thereby facing us when the Creed was recited ; 
it was explained to me that she was "a very old- 
fashioned person." In 1836 the church was re- 



GOULBURN 269 

stored (we worshipping the while in Merton 
Chapel), an ugly clerk's house in the churchyard 
swept away, the vast family pews abolished, the 
services improved to a pitch for that time highly 
ornate, starveling as it would seem now. Denison 
was followed by Hamilton ; Hamilton by William 
Adams, author of the once famous " Allegories "; 
Adams by Stewart Bathurst, who followed Newman 
to Rome ; he by Edmund Hobhouse, not long 
deceased, at a great age, emeritus Bishop of Nelson. 
Few churches have ever been so shepherded in 
a succession so long unbroken. It was believed 
that a particular set of Merton rooms in which 
these pastors lived held an occult power of 
episcopal generation ; certainly I have breakfasted 
there with three occupants who afterwards became 
bishops. 

Good men as all these were, yet, with the 
exception of Adams, who at his early death left 
behind him a volume of touching sermons, none 
of them made the drum ecclesiastic musically re- 
sonant. That distinction was reserved for Goul- 
burn in the opening of the Forties. "'Obhouse 
and 'Ansell are below par/' said Mr. Hounslow, 
the Radical grocer in High Street, to a stranger in 
quest of Sunday pabulum ; " go to 'Olywell and 
'ear Goulburn." Always noted as a preacher, Goul- 
burn was a man rather lovable than eminent, a man 
who sank into the surroundings of the high posts 
he filled, discharging their duties conscientiously, 
but affixing to them no stamp of genius. A Balliol 
Scholar, he was intimate with Lake, Stanley, Brodie, 
Waldegrave, Golightly ; gained a First Class, and 



270 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

became Fellow of Merton. These laurels won, 
he started on a tour with Stanley, which was 
terminated by an accident to his leg. Stanley used 
to tell how, overhearing from his bed the physician, 
Dr. Bruno Byron's incapable doctor sixteen years 
before express his fear lest suppuration should 
set in, the invalid called out in his mincing tones, 
" Sup-pu-ration I never heard the word before, 
but it exactly expresses what I feel." Rescued 
from suppuration and from Bruno, he returned 
home to take Orders and to become Vicar of the 
small Holywell parish. His wife was of the Aynhoe 
Cartwright family ; he brought his bride to the 
pretty little Holywell Cottage, now swept away, 
and at once made his mark as a preacher. Towns- 
people and undergraduates swelled his congre- 
gations, finding in the frankness, variety, humanism, 
of his sermons a refreshing contrast to the texti- 
ferous platitudes or the dry formalisms emitted 
respectively from neighbouring Low or High 
Church pulpits. Nor was the absurd strain wanting 
which ran ever through his character, actions, talk. 
Delicious bits of finical rhetoric, set off by his 
detached, tinkling, monosyllabic delivery, come 
up to me out of the past; as when, preaching on 
the Jews of Berea, he began, " It may be predicated 
of the Bereans that they permitted no extraneous 
circumstances to counteract the equipoise of their 
equanimity " ; or when, magnifying the wisdom of 
Providential adaptation in nature, he concreted his 
illustration by a lt min-now," which swam so often 
into our ken as to be at last greeted with a general 
titter. His theology, baldly Calvinistic at the outset. 



GOULBURN 271 

was afterwards modified by contact with Samuel 
Wilberforce, when that astute prelate, all things to 
all men in his diocese, muzzled his Low Church 
opponents Litton, Hayward Cox, John Hill, and 
others by making their like-minded friend Goul- 
burn one of his examining chaplains. It culminated 
finally in that dexterously balanced Anglican ortho- 
doxy which, whatever its effect upon their intel- 
lectual expansion, earns for its doctrinaires the 
valuable repute of "soundness," and so "not 
unfrequently leads to positions of considerable 
emolument." l It led Goulburn to a post for which 
he was certainly not suited, the Headmastership 
of Rugby. In the competition his rival was Lake, 
on all grounds a fitter man. Lake was essentially 
an educator, Goulburn restrictedly an evangelist. 
Lake represented all the tendencies and traditions 
which had made Rugby the first school in England, 
Goulburn must inevitably thwart them : to the 
Tory trustees who held the election in their hands, 
and who later on appointed Hayman, that was 
Goulburn's strongest recommendation. They 
chose Goulburn and rejected Lake, causing Arthur 
Stanley, for once in his placable life, to lose his 
temper and say hard things. 

Goulburn went to Rugby with misgivings, found 
the work uncongenial, after eight years resigned it 
with delight. " He was not/' writes to me an old 
pupil who was in his house and loved him well, 
"he was not intended to be a headmaster. He 
was a mediaeval saint with great social power ; 
simplicity itself, with the pomposity of a D,P, of 
1 Page 124. 



272 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

those times : he used, for instance, to go out to 
dinner in his cassock, and never appeared without 
it among us boys. He preached on excellent 
theses, but loved Latinised expressions : ' Let the 
scintillations of your wit be like the coruscations 
of summer lightning, lambent but innocuous.' He 
believed in surprises to attract attention ; would 
preach on occasions from the eagle instead of 
from the pulpit, would choose as a text 'The 
King of Jericho, one ; the King of Ai, one/ and 
so on, reading out all the thirty-one in order ; 
would conceal a horsewhip under his gown in 
school, and crack it to help out a passage in 
Aristophanes. He seldom knew one boy from 
another : ' Well, little boy, what do you want ? ' 
passing his hand over one's head in a fatherly 
way, but having forgotten all the previous inter- 
view. He was fleeced by his servants, who starved 
us ; adored personally by Benson, who saw his 
goodness ; ridiculed by Bradley, who saw his 
failures : Compton was his relative, and the first 
attempt at a science master in the school ; a good 
attempt, but badly carried out. When Goulburn 
left, he tried to keep out Temple in favour of Fan- 
shawe from Bedford, but happily failed. Temple 
restored discipline by a system of superannuation. 
Had it not been for Tom Evans, Bradley, Benson, 
as assistant masters, the teaching would have been 
as bad a failure as the discipline. And yet he was 
an ideal gentleman and a Christian." 

He returned to the field in which he was an 
expert, the field of parochial and pastoral work, 
at Quebec Chapel and St. John's, Paddington ; 



GOULBURN 273 

until he made perhaps the second blunder of 
his life by accepting the Deanery of Norwich. 
As Dean he found scope for his preaching power, 
but was deficient in the secular and practical side 
of chapter work. At this time were written many 
of his devotional manuals, and by these his name 
will be remembered longest. Once or twice he 
took public action ; when Stanley was made Select 
Preacher at Oxford he protested by resigning the 
similar office which he held ; but the step left un- 
touched their personal friendship, and on Stanley's 
death he preached a funeral sermon which, since 
Burgon sternly denounced it, was probably in all 
ways generous and Christian. He wrote afterwards 
the Life of that eccentric divine. Few men have 
offered scope so inviting to a biographer at once 
poet, critic, artist, theologian, buffoon, at once in- 
decently scurrilous and riotously comic, he lived 
and died as if to inspire above all things a brief 
and brilliant memoir : but Goulburn produced 
two ponderous volumes as unreadable as the 
" Guicciardini " of Macaulay's anecdote. After a 
time his deanery palled on him as his head- 
mastership had done : its quasi-episcopal rubs 
and worries, exhilarating to a Wilberforce or a 
Magee, were to him intolerable; he long pined 
to be rid of it, and at last resigned it. The closing 
public act of his life was to join with Denison, 
Liddon, and a few, a very few, besides, in a de- 
claration, called forth by " Lux Mundi," on the 
" Truth of Holy Scripture," which, defiant of 
German exegesis, of geological discovery, of uni- 
versally accepted Darwinism, restated solemnly, 

s 



274 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

sadly, helplessly, the abandoned theories of un- 
adjusted Biblical criticism. There is a double 
pathos in such spectacles, familiar as they are to 
times of mental change : pathos in the heart- 
sickness of the seniors, left to stand alone in 
ancient ways, whence all but they have fled ; 
from which the forces of enlarged conviction 
have driven the disciples and the friends who 
once walked with them there ; pathos in the half- 
compassionate reluctance of the younger men to 
break away, galled by the stigma of desertion, 
yet submissive to the beckoning of a hand their 
elders cannot see. Some of us, it may be, can 
remain apart from and feel sympathy with both ; 
discerning, from our vantage ground outside the 
conflict, that the old paths and the new, if tra- 
versed in obedience to the prick of conscience 
and of duty, lead to the same goal at last. 

I come to the last of my Papavera, to William 
Sewell, subsequent founder of Radley, prominent 
Fellow of Exeter in the Thirties, a flourishing 
and conspicuous, yet somehow a questionable, 
specimen what botanists call Papaver dubimn 
among the poppies of his day. In fluency of 
speech, fertility of mind, fascination of manner, 
he had no contemporary rival ; his public teach- 
ing, like his private talk, was ever rousing, per- 
suasive, lofty; it seemed that those eloquent lips 
could open only to emit godlike sentiments and 
assert uncompromising principles. In truth, they 
were not often closed : he was Select Preacher 
and Professor of Moral Philosophy ; his lectures 



SEWELL 275 

on Plato and on Shakespeare filled Exeter College 
Hall ; while in London, as Whitehall Preacher, 
he drew large crowds, amused to hear leading 
statesmen of the day denounced under the names 
of Herod and Pontius Pilate. "More Puseyite 
than Pusey," his emotional theology attracted a 
shallower yet scarcely a less numerous class than 
Newman's inspired sermons. 1 1 seemed that a mitre, 
a Headmastership, or at least the Headship of his 
College, must descend upon so gifted and so popular 
an aspirant : yet standing for Winchester in 1835 
he was beaten by Moberly ; yet when old Collier 
Jones, the MapiKat^ 'Icovevs of Scott's verses, 
died in 1839, Richards, not Sewell, was elected ; 
and, in spite of the promptings of the Ttmes y whose 
young chief Walter had been his pupil, right reverend 
Howleys and Blomfields at headquarters were 
understood to shake doubtful wigs when his name 
was mentioned for promotion. A taint of super- 
ficiality clung to him : " Sewell is very unreal," wrote 
Newman to Bowden in 1840; "Namby-pamby" 
Hampden called him ; ll Preaches his dreams " was 
shrewd Shuttleworth's comment on his University 
sermons ; " Sewell," said Jowett in 1848, " Sewell, 
talking rashly and positively, . . . has gone far to 
produce that very doubt and scepticism of which he 
himself complains." " How silent you have been, 
Jacobson," said he at the end of a large gathering 
in his rooms, where, as usual, he had done all 
the talking ; " you have not said anything worth 
listening to." " Nor heard," was Jacobson's answer. 
So through the Forties he continued Tutor of 
Exeter "excessively discursive," says Dean Boyle ; 



276 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

"would commence a lecture on Aristotle and end 
with the Athanasian Creed or the beauties of Gothic 
architecture." "Sewell's last" formed the staple 
of Exeter breakfast parties. I well remember his 
cremation of Froude's " Nemesis of Faith/' a feat 
reduced from myth to fact in Max Miiller's " Auld 
Lang Syne." "What is meant by gold, frankin- 
cense, myrrh ? " he propounded on another day. 
The regulation answer was given. " Yes ; but shall 
you understand me if I tell you that they also mean 
logic, rhetoric, and metaphysics ? " Many more I 
could relate, but ex ungue leonem. Meanwhile men 
around him were moving on, and he marked time : 
opposed in a once famous hysterical sermon the 
erection of the new Museum; wrote, under the 
title of " Lord John Russell's Postbag," a series 
of lampoons, discreditable in their imputations and 
distortive of his opponents' motives, against the Uni- 
versity Commission. He was to learn that v/3pk 
has its nemesis no less than faith : a translation 
of the Odes of Horace from his pen was mercilessly 
gibbeted in the Edinburgh by John Conington, and 
all England laughed over a review by Conybeare 
of his " Year's Volume of Sermons." Both articles 
were, of course, intentionally punitive ; the second 
was good-humoured, and the savagery of the first 
was justifiable. I have not seen the Horace for 
fifty years, but some of its absurdities still cling to 
me. Here is his opening of the Parentis olim : 

" If a man upon a time 
Ever has with hand of crime 
Wrenched his sire's aged neck, I ween 
'Tts that he hath eating been 
Garlic, deadlier without question 



SEWELL 277 

E'en than hemlock : oh digestion 
Hard as iron of the reaper ! 
What is this, that still so deep here, 
Keeps turmoiling in my chest?" 

We laughed ; but I do not think he lost general 
repute. He remained the exciting public lecturer 
and preacher, the supremely fascinating talker, the 
genial and accomplished host ; entertaining in this 
last capacity the Archaeological Society in 1850 at 
a magnificent entertainment, when the Fellows' 
pretty garden was illuminated, the great Service 
tree hung with coloured lamps, the Distin family 
performing upon their saxhorns in the Hall. Mean- 
while his energy had broken out in a new place. 
One of the cleverest of Oxford skits, " The Grand 
University Logic Stakes of 1849," 1 attributed to 
Landon of Magdalen, and academising with mar- 
vellous dexterity the language of the Turf, de- 
scribed the "runners" for the Praelectorship of 
Logic in 1839 anc * 1849. Sewell bears the stable 
name of "Gruel," so richly descriptive of his 
querulous invalid voice and cataplasmic counte- 
nance that it clung to him ever after. 

" Gruel continues to make a show in the world, and stands 
high in public estimation. He has taken to a novel line, in 
which he has come out rather strong. He appears to have left 
the Turf altogether for the present. After a long season in 
Ireland, where, notwithstanding several influential Backers, he 
seems to have been a failure, he returned to the Marquis of 
Exeter's stables. His lordship still drives him in his four-in- 
hand, giving him an occasional day's work at Radley Farm, 
where he goes to plough and drill on a new system with an 
Irish horse called Single-peeper." 

1 Appendix R. 



278 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

There was in the Forties an epidemic of High 
Church novelettes. Sewell's name appeared as 
editor on the title-page of his sister's popular tales, 
"Amy Herbert" and her successors, and he him- 
self wrote " Hawkstone," a queer, sensational pro- 
duction, but hinting an idea which had for some 
time taken possession of his mind the establish- 
ment of an educational institution " on a new 
system," on the lines of our older public schools, 
but with minute observance of Prayer Book rules. 
The consequence elsewhere attaching to slowly 
matured antiquity was here to be ready made, by 
sumptuous fittings and surroundings, academic 
dress, a collegiate framework in which the head 
was to be a "warden," the assistant masters 
"fellows." St. Columba's College was opened in 
1844 at Stackallan, in County Meath. Its warden 
was Singleton, afterwards head of Radley ; its sub- 
warden Tripp of Worcester, an enthusiastic, amiable, 
not powerfully minded Wykehamist. It received 
munificent support from Lord Adare, from the 
Primate, from William Monsell, and from Dr. Todd 
of T.C.D. ; but friction soon arose, and the site was 
moved to Rathfarnham on the Dublin mountains, 
where I believe it still survives. Sewell retired from 
the enterprise, and in 1847 opened St. Peter's 
College, Radley, on the same lines, with Singleton 
as its first warden. For this venture large sums 
were wanted ; Sewell obtained them by his extra- 
ordinary genius for enlisting the sympathies and 
picking the pockets of plutocrats, calling frequently, 
it was said, at great merchants' counting-houses 
and coming out with weighty cheques. Soon 



SEWELL 279 

visitors from Oxford saw cubicled dormitories, 
a tastefully decorated chapel with a fine Flemish 
triptych, magnificent carved oak sideboards, tables, 
cabinets, and, it must be added, very few boys. 

Warden Singleton, whom I knew intimately, was 
one of the noblest of men, self-sacrificing, generous, 
high-principled, true as truth itself. From consider- 
able private means he had given bounteously to 
both schools, lending money to Sewell as well. 
The moral tone of the boys under his rule was 
perfect, their scholarship respectable, they loved 
him dearly, he managed economically the current 
outlay; buti\ie numbers did not rise. His manners 
told unfavourably on Oxford men ; over a pipe 
or on board his yacht he was a genial Irish gentle- 
man, but at the Radley high table, exalting not 
his person but his office, his stern elevation of 
manner was repellent. Hascoll, the sub-warden, 
a half-pay naval captain, who spoke French and 
was supposed to teach it, had no social qualifica- 
tions. The assistant masters were gentlemen but 
not scholars, for the salaries were very low ; the 
only honour man amongst them, Howard of 
Lincoln, son to Charles Howard, R.A.; afterwards 
Director-General of Public Instruction at Bombay ; 
spent all his time in plaguing Singleton and 
agitating for a stronger brew of college beer ; 
for by the statutes the " fellows " were independent 
of and could control the warden, and three amongst 
them succeeded in driving Singleton from his 
post. They chose instead of him William Heathcote 
of New College, who promptly dismissed the insur- 
rectionary cabal ; but, discovering after a time 



280 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

the unsound financial basis of the school, and 
prevented from obtaining a proper audit of the 
accounts by Sewell's refusal to explain a certain 
large and unaccountable deficit, he in his turn 
threw up the post. Sewell now perforce took 
the reins himself, with a great name, magnificent 
conceptions, and a genial acquiescence in Ancient 
Pistol's motto, " Base is the slave who pays." The 
school went up with a rush, the " eight" rowed 
at Henley ; entertainments were given on saints' 
days, the " college plate" on the tables, the senior 
boy, " Bob " Risley, welcoming the guests in Latin 
speeches; Sewell proclaiming in terms of pious 
gratitude that the school was out of debt, at a time 
when I knew him to owe Singleton ^5000, and 
more than suspected far heavier liabilities behind. 
In fact, the splendour, like Timon's, " masked an 
empty coffer." The school had never paid ; after 
the first capital was exhausted reckless purchases 
had gone on ; cases of decorative treasures, in- 
cluding Agra marbles at a guinea a foot, lay still 
packed in outhouses as they had arrived, to be sold 
for a trifle when the bubble burst ; heavy loans 
were obtained, heavier debts heaped up ; boys were 
taken for six years' payment in advance at largely 
reduced fees, which vanished as soon as they were 
received. Finally, to celebrate the opening of 
a new gymnasium, which cost somebody 1600, 
a Belshazzar feast was given to all who then 
or in the past had been connected with St. 
Columba's or with Radley. A vast assembly came ; 
Sewell, in full Doctor's dress of scarlet and black 
velvet, welcomed us as usual, a perfect host. We 



SEWELL 281 

sat to a splendid banquet ; Dan Godfrey's band 
discoursed sweet music ; 600 Ib. of strawberries, we 
were told, covered the tables at dessert, and all went 
merry as a marriage bell. After dinner, not 
waiting for the concert, as my wife and I sat 
expecting our carriage in an unlighted corner, 
we saw Hubbard of the Bank of England, whom 
I knew to have made large advances, pacing up and 
down alone, with anxious face and corroded brow. 
" The handwriting on the wall," I whispered ; 
and so it was. The reckless extravagance of that 
evening scared him ; a closer inspection of the 
school affairs revealed secrets of indebtedness 
which had been hitherto concealed from him. 
Within a few days he seized the place as principal 
creditor, sent Sewell right away, repudiated all 
his debts, cancelled the claims of parents who had 
paid in advance, sold all unnecessary splendours, 
placed in charge Norman, one of the masters 
who was highly popular with the boys, to work the 
school as his property in reduction of its dues 
to him. Sewell came into Oxford a broken 
man, then disappeared ; lived for some years on 
the Continent; returned to England, and died in 
1874, at the house of a nephew near Manchester. 



CHAPTER XVI 

WALK ABOUT ZION 

" Since all that is not heaven must fade , 
Light be the hand of Ruin laid 

Upon the home I love : 
With hilling spell let soft Decay 
Steal on, and spare the giant sway, 
The crash of tower and grove?* 

KEBLE. 

Venerable Oxford Ancient Landmarks The Greyhound Mother 
Jeffs Mother Louse Mother George Mother Goose The 
Angel Some Old Establishments The High Jubber's and 
Sadler's Convivialities Changes The Oxford that I love. 

THE Psalmist bade his countrymen mark the 
towers, bulwarks, palaces of their historic city in its 
prime of queenliness, that they might " tell it to the 
generations following." What would the Biblical 
student give for such a Hestiagraph to-day ? Many 
a fragmentary chapter of Jewish story might be well 
replaced by a brief record, contemporary, personal, 
picturesque, of the scenes which are now to us mere 
shadow-names : Solomon's Palace and the Royal 
Tombs, the Tyropceon megaliths and the Bakers' 
Street, the pools of Enrogel, Gihon, Siloam, the 
gilded dome of Zion "towering o'er her marble 
stairs." Oxford is not, like Jerusalem, a buried 
city ; yet the Oxford of to-day is not the Oxford 
of the Thirties ; ever and again as I recall events 

and personages they need the background and 

282 



WALK ABOUT ZION 283 

the setting which enshrined them then, and is 
now impaired or swept away. The dreaming spires 
of the sweet city show still from the Cumnor or 
the Rose Hill heights, as they showed to Matthew 
Arnold sixty years ago ; he could not now go on to 
say that "she lies steeped in sentiment, spreading 
her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from 
her towers the last enchantments of the Middle 
Age," for the encroaching nineteenth century has 
dissolved that still removed charm. 1 Tram-lines 
mar to-day the pontifical symmetry of Magdalen 
Bridge ; an intruding chasm breaks the perfect 
High Street curves ; St. Mary's spire, tapering from 
its nest of pinnacles, has been twice deformed 
by restoration ; Vanbrugh's quaint house in Broad 
Street is sacrificed to a stodgy Indian Institute : 
Christchurch Meadow with its obstructed river 
banks tempts me to render railing for railing ; 
the Broad Walk veterans are disarrayed or fallen ; 
a vulgar and discordant <pile has banished the civil- 
suited nymphs of Merton Grove. Visiting extant 

1 Let me go back further still, and embalm forgotten lines 
from Tom Warton's " Triumph of I sis " : 

"Ye fretted pinnacles, ye fanes sublime, 
Ye towers that wear the mossy vest of time, 
Ye massy piles of old munificence, 
At once the pride of learning and defence ; 
Ye cloisters pale, that length'ning on the sight 
To contemplation, step by step, invite ; 
Ye high-arched walks, where oft the whispers clear 
Of harps unseen have swept the poet's ear ; 
Ye temples dim, where pious duty pays 
Her holy hymns for ever echoing praise ; 
Lo ! your loved Isis from the bordering vale 
With all a mother's fondness bids you Hail ! " 



284 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Oxford, I should explore the venerable haunts, seek 
the ancient Termini, probe the mouldering associa- 
tions of High and Broad, of Iffley Road, and 
Cowley Marsh, and Bullingdon all in vain, like 
Rogers' old man wandering in quest of something. 
The change had begun when Arnold wept over 
Thyrsis' urn "In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps 
the same " ; it is far more devastating to-day. Let 
me in this last paper recover where I can its erased 
or vanishing landmarks forntce veneres captare 
fugaces as a setting to the recorded incidents 
and characters which they should illustrate and 
frame. 

In the early Thirties, then, railroads and en- 
closures had not girdled Oxford proper with a 
coarse suburban fringe. On the three approaches 
to the town, the Henley, Banbury, Abingdon 
Roads, it was cut off, clear as a walled and gated 
Jericho, from the adjacent country. One side of 
it there is which I now never dare approach : 
enclosure Acts and jerry builders and villatic 
burghers have effaced by "long straggling streets 
of ricketty cottages " what was once the most 
harmonious avenue to the most beautiful city in 
the world. In the days when Tullus was Consul 
you sped through Nuneham, Sandford, and Little- 
more behind the four horses of the Tantivy or 
the Rival, until from Rose Hill top you saw and 
never lost again the long line of pinnacles and 
spires bosomed in foliage less obscuring than to- 
day. Past Rose Bank, the home of Newman's 
mother and her two clever girls, the road ran for 
a short distance much as it runs now, then opened 



WALK ABOUT ZION 285 

houseless and hedgeless all the way, marked only 
by one towering hawthorn known as the "half- 
way bush/' to the turnpike which barred access 
to Magdalen Bridge. Far to the right stretched 
the northern view, across Cowley Marsh, the 
windows of newly-built Headington Asylum glaring 
in the western sun, up the Bullingdon ascent, 
where I have many times shot snipe and gathered 
Parnassia and butterwort, arid so away to Shot- 
over. On the left were the unbroken willow-dotted 
I sis meadows, rising beyond the gleaming river 
into Bagley Wood, and to the line of Berkshire 
hills crowned by Cumnor Hurst and the Gipsy 
Scholar's Tree. As you neared Oxford, on what 
is now Christchurch Cricket-ground were unen- 
closed acres of wheat, decked with poppies, 
scabious, corn cockle, and blue centaury ; on the 
opposite side towered three vast black hillocks, 
to and from which all day long passed the Corpora- 
tion carts laden with coal refuse of a thousand 
hearths, to be sifted and sold as cinder or as ash. 
Along the smooth hard road streamed in endless 
variety the vehicles of pre-railroad days ; mail 
coaches by the score, gigs, tandems, carriages and 
four, carriers' carts from adjacent villages and 
towns, mighty petorrita of the great London stage- 
waggoners, lowlier wains heaped high with hay and 
corn. The bordering gravel path was sprinkled 
in early morning by troops of fresh-faced girls 
bearing poised upon their heads high wicker 
baskets filled with fruit, vegetables, turnip-tops ; 
in the afternoon by academical pedestrians in 
pairs or triplets, transacting the regulation grind 



286 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

to Iffley, Cowley, or Sandford. Not that the 
word "grind" was invented then; that and "con- 
stitutional " were subsequent terms, the last, I think, 
first made classical by Miss Cornelia Blimber. 
Dons were there as well as undergraduates, even 
one or two Heads of Houses ; old Sneyd of All 
Souls, and tall Plumtre of University, walking 
daily solitary and solemn, sometimes Gaisford 
with a handsome daughter, and Macbride with a 
daughter who was certainly not handsome. There 
too on most days was to be seen a regiment of 
boys, commanded by a stern Orbilius clad in 
spencer and black gaiters, which was known as 
"Slatter's School." Located at Rose Hill, it was 
famous far and near ; the best Oxford families 
sent to it all their sons. Amongst my school- 
fellows were Le Mesurier, a brilliant scholar 
of Corpus, who died young ; Haggitt, son to 
Lord Harcourt's Nuneham chaplain mentioned 
in Madame D'Arblay's diary ; and afterwards, as 
Wegg Prosser, M.P. for Hereford ; Stowe, First 
Class and Fellow of Oriel, who went out as 
Times correspondent to the Crimea and there died ; 
Faussett, till lately the efficient Bursar of Christ- 
church ; and Fred Thistlethwaite, famous in 
London society for his immense wealth and his 
manner of spending it : he achieved unique dis- 
tinction by running away from Eton, Harrow, and 
Winchester in succession : of the three schools 
he found Winchester the most intolerable, and 
resigned it after three days' trial. His father, a 
Hampshire squire, owned land in what was then 
the village of Paddington ; converted into West- 



WALK ABOUT ZION 287 

bournia it became golden, and Fred was the 
heres dignior. Slatter was a remarkable man ; an 
accomplished chemist, and one of the best astro- 
nomers of his time, having a mighty Herschel's 
telescope in constant use. He was an admirable 
teacher ; no boys in England were better grounded 
than ourselves, nor in a greater variety of subjects ; 
but he was disciplinary even in excess of the 
savage custom then thought necessary in schools. 
His desk was garnished with a quite curious 
collection of canes incessantly in use a posteriori, 
and a large wooden tubeless thermometer was 
reserved for hand-spanking, or, as he called it, 
" strappado." To the music of these flagellants 
all our work was set : stimulated by my mother, 
I kept account during one half-year of my own 
personal tragedies : they numbered fifty-two, re- 
presenting on an average more than two in a week, 
administered for no default of immorality or dis- 
obedience, but for syntactical fallacies in construing, 
or for Propria Quce Maribus incompletely learned. 
We endured stoically ; to cry out was thought 
pusillanimous ; like Dido, we wept in silence, 
accepting the baculi ictus as no less germane to 
progress than were Grammar and Delectus. And 
we bore no malice ; went back to pay friendly 
visits to our Busby after we t had left; hoped 
nothing worse for him when consigned to Iffley 
churchyard than that he might be tended in his 
repose by cherubs structurally impervious to the 
discipline, which even in another world he might 
find impossible to lay aside. 

One feature of the Via Appia to the Sacred 



288 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

City I have not mentioned, old St. Clement's 
Church, standing in the fork of the Headington 
and Iffley roads at the entrance on Magdalen 
Bridge. Andrew Lang in his book on Oxford 
tells us that visitors approaching it by the eastern 
entrance would pass the "boiled rabbit" on their 
right. That is not so; the " boiled rabbit" was 
built during Newman's curacy in the late Twen- 
ties ; the old church bore no cuniculous simili- 
tude. In the new church, still extant, and notable 
as one of the few English synagogues where 
sermons are still emitted in black gown, Newman 
never officiated ; its Pastor for many years was 
]. W. Hughes, of Trinity, whose family of capti- 
vating daughters filled on Sunday the spacious 
vicarage pew. He took private pupils to read for 
Matriculation ; when two of these had successively 
married his two eldest girls, he received the name 
of "the judicious Hooker." He was a handsome, 
well-dressed man, read the service rhetorically, 
preached fine parish sermons. He was a hack 
Saint's-Day preacher at St. Mary's, earning five 
guineas by the delivery of an old sermon to a 
church quite empty except for the Vice-Chancellor 
and Bedels. When Isaac Williams came up to 
reside as Trinity Tutor, he made a duty of 
attending all University sermons, to the discom- 
fiture of Hughes, who said to Tommy Short one 
day, " I wonder what Williams admires in my 
sermons ; he is the only University man who 
attends them ; it is highly complimentary, but 
puts me to the trouble of looking out sermons 
appropriate to the days." The system was after- 




SJ 




From an Engraving after a Water-Colout belonging to the Family 



WALK ABOUT ZION 289 

wards altered : poor Hughes, his daughters, and 
his sermons, delevit aetas. 

It was in the old church that J. H. Newman 
served his first curacy under the octogenarian 
antiquary John Gutch, Registrar of the University, 
editor of Anthony Wood, author of " Collectanea 
Curiosa." Newman in his letters to his sister 
depicts gratefully the valuable assistance rendered 
by the old Rector's daughters ; Sarah, the youngest, 
lived to her ninetieth year, the most efficient visitor 
of the poor in Oxford. For her last ten years 
she was bedridden when I saw her shortly 
before her death, in 1882, she told me how the 
aged Cardinal, visiting Oxford, had climbed to 
her room and sat long beside her bed, affec- 
tionately recalling old times and people. From 
church and turnpike you passed the bridge, the 
Physic Garden open on your left ; for the resi- 
dence built by Daubeny had not then risen, and 
the Professor, Dr. Williams, lived in the house 
facing Rose Lane. Water-carts were not as yet 
invented, and in very dry weather the street was 
irrigated from its five or six fire-plugs we re- 
member Mr. Bouncer's F.P. 7 ft. commencing 
at Magdalen elms. A sheet of canvas with a 
wooden frame was laid across the gutter, and 
the water turned on until it swelled into a pool, 
then with curious dexterity dashed in all direc- 
tions by a bare-legged Aquarius, with the aid of 
an enormous wooden shovel. The gate of Mag- 
dalen was Jacobaean, of debased style, but more 
stately and more in harmony with the College 
than any of its successors ; adjoining it was a 

T 



290 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

remnant of the old Magdalen Hall, used as the 
choristers' school, with a modern cottage inhabited 
by the College manciple Stephens. He was the 
most Waltonian of Oxford anglers, my guide on 
many an occasion to the waters of Cherwell, 
Upper Isis, Windrush, knowing every spot where 
a skilfully dropped "gudgin" would capture perch 
or pike. Where Magdalen schoolroom now stands, 
was the Greyhound inn. Under one of the trees 
sat always an apple - faced old woman, Mother 
Jeffs, selling tarts and fruits, last of a famous 
sisterhood whose names and effigies survive out 
of the hoary past. There was Mother Louse, 
whose portrait by Loggan is a prize to print col- 
lectors, the latest woman in England to wear a 
ruff ; Mother George, who at more than a hundred 
years old would, on payment of a shilling, thread 
a needle without spectacles; Mother Goose the 
flower-seller, pictured by Dighton in a coloured 
drawing which I reproduce; her contemporary Nell 
Batchelor, pie- woman, an epitaph to whose ''pie- 
house memory " was inscribed by a forgotten wit 

" Here under the dust is the mouldering crust 

Of Eleanor Batchelor shoven, 
Well versed in the art of pie, custard, and tart, 
And the lucrative skill of the oven. 

When she'd lived long enough, she made her last puff, 

A puff by her husband much praised ; 
Now here she doth lie, and makes a dirt pie, 

In the hope that her crust may be raised." 

From Coach and Horse Lane to the Angel 
stretched a great block of shops, swept away to 




HER LOUSE, of LOUSE. 



MAIA,,mrar OXF OHU . 

> army Jleu {&. j-c liAe a I 



'2nt/iir'f6a/mrtfrtn?a>in A f 
^berrtff. fafau** >nj- Xcf& artfaUt 
Js ttuftne,*-ratm) ^ IrtTF ytu 
)citf ffrafU/mciAerjvu sfsiyr 
JEnoraved from the Original Print 




u ?ba& 

by David. Loggan Price 7-6. 



MOTHER LOUSE 
From the Line Engraving after Loggan 



WALK ABOUT ZION 291 

make room for the new Schools. The corner 
house was tenanted by James, a confectioner, cook 
of Alban Hall, where the traditional dinner grace 
ran, "For what James allows us make us truly 
thankful " ; another exhibited the graceful plaster 
casts of Guidotti, an Italian image-seller, with an 
extremely handsome English wife. The Angel was 
the fashionable hotel ; the carriages and four of 
neighbouring seigneurs, Dukes of Marlborough 
and Buckingham, Lords Macclesfield, Abingdon, 
Camoys, dashed up to it ; there, too, stopped all 
day post-chaises, travelling chariots, equipages of 
bridal couples, coaches from the eastern road ; 
all visitors being received at the hall door by the 
obsequious manager Mr. Bishop, in blue tail-coat 
gilt-buttoned and velvet-collared, buff waistcoat, 
light kerseymere pantaloons, silk stockings and 
pumps, a gold eyeglass pendent from a broad 
black ribbon ; escorted by Wallace, a huge mastiff, 
who made friends with every guest. All of it 
has vanished except the spacious coffee-room, 
which became Cooper's shop. The Old Bank 
stood where now it stands, already some twenty 
years old. It was founded by two tradesmen 
Thompson, a gunsmith, and Parsons, a draper, 
the latter brother to Dr. Parsons, Master of Balliol 
and Bishop of Peterborough. Passing gallantly 
through the money panic of 1825, when Walter 
Scott was ruined and half the banks in England 
broke, it rose into high repute, obtained the de- 
posits of all the Colleges, and retains probably 
most of them to-day under the grandsons of its 
founders. Close to it were Vincent's Rooms, the 



292 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

home of the Union, whose debates were held in 
a hall behind Wyatt's picture shop. In 1835 the 
house of Wood, the apothecary, at the entrance 
to Skimmery Hall Lane, was translated into 
Spiers', now itself extinct, but for nearly sixty 
years inseparable from Oxford life, better served 
and more artistic in its merchandise than any 
shop in England. Its display of papier mache' 
and of ceramic ware, surrounding a beautiful 
cardboard model of the Martyrs' Memorial, was 
one of the features in the 1851 Exhibition. 

There were in the High two superior con- 
fectioners, Jubber's and Sadler's, where white-hatted 
Christchurch dandies lounged and ate ices in the 
afternoons. The principal tailor was Joy, in a 
large shop opposite Wadham. He was denominated 
Parson Joy, having been met in the Long Vacation 
travelling on the Continent with his brother, as 

Captain and the Rev. Joy. He bequeathed his 

book debts to one of his daughters ; they amounted 
to ^4000, and she used to say that every penny 
was recovered. The two large booksellers were 
Talboys, in the handsome pillared shop opposite 
St. Peter's Church, and Joseph Parker, in the Turl, 
whose management of the Bible Press had converted 
a heavy debt into .100,000 of profit, and who had 
lately made a hit by publishing two unassuming 
and anonymous little volumes, destined, as "The 
Christian Year" "The Sunday Puzzle" Sydney 
Smith called it to achieve unprecedented popu- 
larity. Its success was a surprise both to Keble 
and his friends. Isaac Williams, to whom he had 
shown it, did not admire it. Froude feared that 




MVTHER GOOSE of OXFORD 

MOTHER GOOSE 

From a Coloured Lithograph by Dighton 




WALK ABOUT ZION 293 

people reading it would take the author for a 
Methodist. So careless of it was Keble, that he 
lost the little red book into which it was written, 
and it was printed from a copy he had given to 
Rickards of Oriel. "It will be still-born/' said 
he, as he left the manuscript with Baxter ; " I 
publish it only in obedience to my father's wishes." 
The chief wine merchant was Latimer, a tall, 
gentlemanlike, handsome man, with a fine house 
on Headington Hill. One of his stories deserves 
recital. A county magnate, notorious for his 
meanness, had ordered six dozen of a fine brown 
sherry, which he sent back by-and-by, minus one 
bottle, with a message that the Duke had tried the 
wine and disapproved of it. lt Put it back," said 
Latimer to his cellarer, " and we'll call it the Duke's 
wine." Entertaining a party at luncheon soon 
after, he narrated the incident, and proposed that 
they should try the wine. Up came a bottle ; the 
guests smelt, tasted, looked at one another, said 
nothing, till Latimer's glass was filled. It was toast 
and water ; so was the whole binn : the bottles had 
been opened, the wine drawn off, the simpler fluid 
substituted. 

Crossing from the Old Bank into Cat Street, you 
might read in large letters on the All Souls wall 
"No Bristol Riots," painted there in 1831. Ten 
years ago it was still visible in certain conditions of 
sunlight. The squalid cottages in Cat Street had 
not been long pulled down, and the Radcliffe 
surrounded with railings. By this last adornment 
hangs a tale. The outer walls of Brasenose and 
Lincoln exactly touch one another in Brasenose 



294 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Lane ; you may walk from the Brasenose gate 
opposite the Radcliffe to Lincoln gate in the Turl 
without taking your hand from the masonry. It 
was in the days when, after dinner, gentlemen 
became unsteady in their walk; when the joyous 
closing stave of Maginn's "Ode to a Bottle of 
Old Port" 

" How blest are the tipplers whose heads can outlive 

The effects of four bottles of thee ; 
But the next dearest blessing that heaven can give 
Is to stagger home muzzy with three" 

was quoted with approval and from experience 
round many a mahogany tree ; and it is easy to 
understand how opportune to a wine-cheered 
veteran would be the continuous support and 
guidance open to him so long as, like Pyramus, he 
should "draw near the wall." A jovial club, the 
bibulous champions of either College, dined 
mutually at Lincoln or at Brasenose on a day in 
alternate weeks, confidingly hugging the wall as 
they reeled home from gate to gate. One night it 
blew a hurricane, and as the Brasenose detachment 
threaded the opening of the lane just under Bishop 
Heber's tree, they were met by so furious a gust 
that they lost hold of the wall and were blown into 
the open. Struggling in the pitchy darkness to 
recover their lost stay, they were brought up against 
the unrailed Radcliffe. Joyously they resumed their 
progress ; occasional suspicion that the way was 
long floated through their muddy brains ; but port 
wine, deranging reason, leaves faith undisturbed, 
and on they went. The night was on the wane, 
and at break of day the early coaches sweeping 




WALK ABOUT ZION 295 

past beheld a procession of vinous seniors, cap and 
gown awry, slowly following their leader in single 
file round and round the Radcliffe. So the railings 
arose, and repetition of the feat became impossible. 
Inside Brasenose, in the centre of the Quad, was a 
curiosity long since removed : the stone figure of a 
man bestriding a prostrate foe, and raising a mighty 
jawbone for the death blow. " Cain and Abel " 
it was called " Cain taking A-bePs-life, his Sunday 
Paper," was the current joke ; and undergraduates 
after wines would clamber on to the fratricide's 
shoulder. Mark Pattison relates how his father, 
caught there one night by Tutor Hodson, answered 
his angry challenge by a quotation from Aristo- 
phanes, and so Apollo saved him. The Post Office 
was in Queen Street, removed afterwards to the 
corner of Bear Lane, to be burned down early one 
Sunday morning in 1842. I remember the intro- 
duction of the Fourpenny Post in 1839, followed by 
the Penny Post in 1840, with black Queen's head, 
stamped envelopes having silken threads let into 
the paper, or Mulready's graceful device. 

Restored Balliol and Trinity, with the unhar- 
monious appendage to New College Slipe, are 
recent alterations. In 1839, the Martyrs' Memo- 
rial replaced a picturesque but tottering old house, 
and the enlargement of St. Mary Magdalen's spoiled 
a well-proportioned church. Jacob Ley, the Vicar, 
used to say that a sermon as delivered to the right 
or left of a certain pillar near the pulpit was 
absolutely inaudible to worshippers on the corre- 
sponding side of it, so that one discourse symmetri- 
cally aimed would serve two Sundays. The Taylor 



196 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Buildings came a little later, on the site of a lofty 
edifice, once a mansion, afterwards decayed, and 
let out in poverty-stricken tenements. The four 
colossal female statues surmounting its eastern side 
were declared by an imaginative undergraduate to 
be effigies of four ladies who lived hard by ; and 
the myth obtained a more than humorous accept- 
ance. In St. John's gardens, sacred to Capability 
Brown, still grew a crooked maple tree planted by 
Archbishop Laud ; and the lines in the portrait of 
Charles I. in the library, inscribing the Psalms of 
David, were clearly legible with a magnifying glass. 
Houses were nowhere then numbered, and the 
names of streets were traditional. Not till 1838 
was Coach and Horse Lane nomenclatured into 
Merton Street, Magpie Lane into Grove Street, 
Skimmery Hall Lane into Oriel Street, Butcher Row 
into Queen Street, Pennyfarthing Lane into Pem- 
broke Street, Fish Street into St. Aldate's, Titmouse 
Lane into Castle Street ; while Bridge Street from 
Magdalen Bridge to East Gate was incorporated 
into High Street. Only Logic Lane, quoted in the 
Spectator, as commemorating mediaeval combats, 
not always of words alone, between Nominalists 
and Realists, no one was profane enough to change. 
The Parks, so called because the Parliamentary 
cannon were planted there in the siege of Oxford, 
was a large ploughed field, divided by a gravel 
walk, bounded on the west by market gardens, on 
the east by a high broad hedge, beyond which lay 
the Cherwell meadows ; a haven to nursemaids and 
their charge, the daily constitutional of elderly, 
inactive Dons. The earthworks of the siege are 



WALK ABOUT ZION 297 

marked in Loggan. The lines are clearly traceable 
to-day in Symonds' field, and the remains of a 
bastion exist in a small coppice near the Clifton 
Laboratory. 

When the new Museum was opened two houses 
sprang up just beyond its northern limit, inhabited 
by Commander Burrows and Goldwin Smith, hence 
known as Pass and Class. They were vaunt-couriers 
to a tremendous irruption ; to the interminable 
streets of villadom, converging insatiably protu- 
berant upon distant Wolvercot and Summertown. 
I cannot frame to pronounce them Oxford ; but 
they suggest to me a momentous query. Nine- 
tenths of their denizens, I am told, are married 
Professors, Tutors, Fellows; men who formerly 
lived in College, resident and celibate and pastoral. 
The sheep live there still ; who shepherds them ? 
Are they successfully autonomous, or controlled by 
deputy shepherds whose own the sheep are not, 
or a happy hunting ground for the grim wolf with 
privy paw ? The old monastic Oxford has evapo- 
rated into the Ewigkeit ; as I pace the Norham Gar- 
dens and the Bradmore Road, leafy thoroughfares 
of the bewildering New Jerusalem, I wonder what 
system has supplanted Zion's, and with what bear- 
ing on discipline and morals ? I do not prejudge 
the answer : I question, like Bassanio, in pure 
innocence ; not croaking sinistrous from my Pylian 
ilex. But as the old glide down the inevitable 
slope, their present becomes a living over again the 
life which has gone before, and the future takes the 
shape of a brief lengthening of the past. To me 
Oxford, the venerable stones of which I love as 



2 9 8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Newman loved the fading willow leaves in Christ- 
church Meadow, must remain cis-paradisean Oxford, 
Oxford southward of the Parks, Oxford of the Thirties 
and the Forties, the Oxford which in these annalistic 
chronicles I have set myself to recover and re- 
people. To Oxonians of to-day they will appeal 
perhaps with something of prehistoric dignity ; it 
may seem suitable that the fading lineaments of a 
time so different from their own should be portrayed 
by one, well-nigh the last, of those who drew from 
them the inspiration of his own youthful dreams 
and fancies ; and some, at least, among the young 
Patrocli who are there beginning life will join 
hands filially and affectionately across the chasm 
of three score and eighteen years with the time- 
worn commemorative NESTOR who must ere 
long resign it. 



SIT FINIS FANDI. 



APPENDICES 



BRASENOSE ALE 

By THOMAS DUNBAR, Fellow of Brasenose, and Keeper of the 
Ashmolean Museum 

(Seep. 12.) 

All ye, who round the buttery hatch 
Eager await the opening latch 

Our barrels to assail, 
Come, listen, while in pleasing gibe 
The rare ingredients I describe 

Which float in Brasenose Ale. 

Guiltless alike of malt and hop, 
Our buttery is a druggist's shop 

Where quassia's draughts prevail ; 
Alum the muddy liquor clears, 
And mimic wormwood's bitter tears 

Compose our Brasenose Ale. 

All ye who physic have professed, 
Sir Kit l and Poticary West, 2 

Your practice gone bewail ! 
The burning mouth, the temple's throb, 
Sick stomach, and convulsive sob, 

Are cured by Brasenose Ale. 

1 Sir Kit Sir Christopher Pegge, p. 62. 2 Poticary West, p, 64. 

299 



300 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

As poisons other poisons kill, 
So, should we with convivial skill 

Old Syms's 1 wine assail, 
Or Latimer's immortal tun, 
"Herbert" yclept or " Abingdon," 

We're cured by Brasenose Ale. 



The fair Cheltenia's opening salt 
Must yield to our factitious malt ; 

What double sconce 2 can fail ? 
But, if you want some tonic stuff, 
You readily will find quant : suff : 

A gill of Brasenose Ale. 



Mysterious as the Sibyl's leaves 
The battels are which each receives j 

But, freshmen, cease to rail ! 
You're fed and physicked ; in your bills 
Each week is vinegar of squills, 

Bark, salts, and Brasenose Ale. 



Oh that our Bursar would consent 
To give the bottled porter vent, 

Porter beloved by Dale ; 8 
Smuggled no more by Joey's 3 stealth, 
It would improve the College health, 

Well scoured by Brasenose Ale. 

1 Syms and Latimer, wine merchants, p. 293. 

2 A double sconce was a fine for improprieties in Hall ; the culprit 
was compelled to drink a gallon of ale. 

3 Rev. Joseph Dale and Joseph Hodgkinson, Fellows of the College 
addicted to Double X. 



APPENDICES 301 

My muse, a half reluctant prude, 

In dudgeon vile George Smith 1 pursued, 

Afraid his verse should fail ; 
When next the annual Ode he woos, 
May he invoke a different Meux, 

'T improve our Brasenose Ale. 



B 

ODE, 

RECITED ON THE ANNIVERSARY DINNER OF THE CHESS 
CLUB, BY THE LAUREATE, THOMAS DUNBAR. 

(Seep. 12.) 

From the bright burning lands and rich forests of Ind, 

See the form of Caissa arise ; 
In the caverns of Brahma no longer confined, 

To the shores of fair Europe she flies. 

A figure so fair through the region of light 

All natives with wonder survey, 
As her varying mantle now darkens with night, 

Now beams with the silver of day. 

Let Whist, like the bat, from such splendour retire, 
A splendour too strong for his eyes ; 

The Trump and Odd Trick let dull Av'rice admire, 
Entrapped by so paltry a prize. 

Can Finesse and the Ten-Ace e'er hope to prevail 
When Reason opposes her weight, 

When inviolate Majesty hangs in the scale, 
And Castles yet tremble with fate ? 

1 He was the College porter. 



302 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

When the bosom of Beauty the throbbing heart meets, 

And Caissa's the gay Valentine, 
What Chessman, who'd tasted such amorous sweets, 

His Mate but with life would resign ? 

But 'tis o'er Terebinth x the decision approves, 
And Whist has contended in vain ; 

To the Mansion of Hades the Genius removes, 
Where he gnaws his own counters in pain. 

On Philosophy's brow a new lustre unfolds, 

Mild reason exults in the birth ; 
His creation benign Father Tuckwell beholds, 

And Steph 2 gives the chaplet to Mirth. 



HENRY MATTHEWS 

(Note to page 13.) 

Henry Matthews well deserves a notice. His father, 
Colonel Matthews, was the owner of a beautiful seat called 
Belmont, on the Wye, in Herefordshire, Colonel of Militia 
and long M.P. for the county ; a sapling planted by him 
in 1788 is still called Colonel Matthews' oak. In his old 
age Henry was wont to attend on him to bed each night, 
where as his head settled into the pillow he repeated always 
in his Herefordshire dialect the same complacent formula, 
" I tell yer 'Enery I thinks the most comfortablest 
place in the world is bed fur there ye forgets all yer 
cares." One of the sons, Charles Skynner Matthews, was 
the intimate Cambridge friend of Byron (Life by Moore, 

1 " Terebinth " was a nickname for Lingard ; in a later edition it 
reads " The decision old Lingard approves." 

* Steph was Stephens, Fellow and Vice-Principal of Brasenose, 
afterwards Rector of Belgrave, near Leicester. 



APPENDICES 303 

vol. i. p. 125), and was drowned in 1812. Another, 
Arthur, I knew well as a Canon of Hereford and Senior 
Fellow of Brasenose ; Henry was the third. At Eton he 
was a reckless madcap, driving tandem through the town, 
and once lighting a bonfire on the floor of Long Chamber. 
He became a Fellow of King's; his health broke down, 
he travelled, publishing in 1820 his "Diary of an Invalid," 
which reached a fifth edition. In 1821 he was appointed 
Advocate Fiscal of Ceylon, married Emma Blount, of 
Orleton Manor, Herefordshire, and sailed for India ; 
passing through Oxford on his way to Southampton, 
and leaving for my father, who was away, a touching 
letter of farewell, which I possess. He became Judge 
in 1827, and died on May 2oth, 1828. His son is the 
present Lord Llandaff. 



D 

THE LETTER H 

(Seep. 67.) 

I insert the original for the sake of comparison. Its 
authorship was doubted at the time, and it was assigned 
to Lord Byron. Lady Stanley, in her " Early Married 
Life," gives Miss Fanshawe's appropriation of it : " I 
do give it under my hand and seal this i2th day of 
February, 1819, that to the best of my belief the Enigma 
of the Letter H was composed, not by the Right Honour- 
able George Lord Byron, but by me, Catherine Maria 
Fanshawe." 

'Twas in heaven pronounced it was muttered in hell, 
And Echo caught faintly the sound as it fell. 
On the confines of earth 'twas permitted to rest, 
And the depths of the ocean its presence confessed. 



304 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

'Twill be found in the sphere when 'tis riven asunder, 

Be seen in the lightning, and heard in the thunder ; 

'Twas allotted to man with his earliest breath, 

Attends at his birth and awaits him in death, 

Presides o'er his happiness, honour, and health, 

Is the prop of his house, and the end of his wealth. 

In the heaps of the miser 'tis hoarded with care, 

But is sure to be lost on his prodigal heir. 

It begins every hope, every wish it must bound, 

With the husbandman toils, and with monarchs is 

crowned. 

Without it the soldier, the seaman, may roam, 
But woe to the wretch who expels it from home. 
In the whispers of conscience its voice will be found, 
Nor e'en in the whirlwind of passion is drowned : 
It will soften the heart, and, though deaf be the ear, 
It will make it acutely and instantly hear. 
Yet in shade let it rest like a delicate flower : 
Ah ! breathe on it softly it dies in an hour ! 



E 
CHARLES WORDSWORTH 

(Seep. 87.) 
EPITAPH ON HIS WIFE, IN WINCHESTER CHAPEL. 

I, nimium dilecta, vocat Deus, I, bona nostrae 
Pars animae ; mcerens altera, disce sequi. 

Translated by Lord Derby. 

Too dearly loved, thy God hath called thee ; go, 
Go, thou best portion of this widowed heart : 

And thou, poor remnant lingering here in woe, 
So learn to follow, as no more to part. 



APPENDICES 305 

CHARLES WORDSWORTH 
INSCRIPTION IN THE GRIMSEL HOTEL BOOK 

, r0ietv, iriveiv, TraXiv 



v 
6pPp6(f>opov a>s ra TrXeio-ra Svcr^pflv Ata, 

3 6 /3lOTO<S lo-Tl TW1> 






Translated : 

To walk, to sleep, to eat, to drink, 

To cry, " How lovely, don't you think ? " 

To wield a six foot alpenstock, 

Talk French, write name in Grimsel book, 

To curse the rain's incessant pour; 
The pleasures these of foreign tour. 



DRAMATIS PERSONS OF THE "BOTHIE" 

(Seep. 98.) 

Hobbes was certainly Ward Hunt, afterwards First Lord of 

the Admiralty. 
Lindsay ', the "Piper," was F. Johnson of Christchurch, 

with some touches of W. H. Da vies. 
Airlie was probably Deacon of Oriel, who joined Clough's 

reading party in the year following. 
Arthur Audley was Herbert Fisher of Christchurch, with, 

say the Walronds, a touch of Theodore Walrond. 
Philip Htwson was Clough himself, with some traits from 

Winder of Oriel. 

Adam was probably not a portrait, but not unlike Clough. 
Hope cannot, I fear, be now identified. 

U 



306 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 



SEPTEM CONTRA CAMUM 
(Seep. 113.) 

i. Vacant. 

ii. Robert Menzies, University. 
iii. Edward Royds, Brasenose. 
iv. William B. Brewster, St. John's. 
v. George D. Bourne, Oriel. 
vi. John C. Cox, Trinity. 
vii. Richard Loundes, Christchurch. 
viii. George E. Hughes, Oriel. 
Coxswain. Arthur T. W. Shadwell, Balliol. 

H 
FRAGMENTA E CODICE BAROCCIANO 1 



" Insanientem navita Bosphorum" 

Tentabo. HORAT. Od. III., iv. 30. 

EXCUDEBAT W. BAXTER, OXONII 

The origin of this clever skit is given on p. 169. 
Its charm lies in the dexterous rendering into Homeric 
Greek of Oxford names and witticisms. 

MONITUM 
TWO fragments, Fragmenta duo, quse in nobilissimo Codice apud 



a g f e pS^ent- Bibliothecam Bodleianam evolvendo nuper detexi, re- 
th'e Bod"eian in ligi ms duxi non primo quoque tempore publici juris 
facere. Auctoris nomen desideratur; colorem tamen 
vere Homericum habent. Adjeci ea quae inter legendum 

1 Where these jeux d'esprit are in a dead language I have 
appended a translation or short paraphrase. 



APPENDICES 



37 



mihi occurrebant, turn ex aliis auctoribus, turn e con- 
jectura petita : sed perfunctorie et currente calamo 
omnia, ut reliquias vere aureas quam citissime cum 
eruditis communicarem. 

Dabam Oxonii, Prid. Cal. Graec. cio . ID . ccc . xxxiv. 
Imprimatur, Wellington, Cancellarius. 



I. E PROCEMIO, UT VIDETUR 

etSe Ota <#ri/A/:?poTOV, 
avSpas aptcrrrjas Trepl jSoWopov 
Ilao-as Se M^u^as, Kal 'laova? e 
Meprwvas 0' erapovs, Ka^eSp^v 0' ocrot a/i(tve/jiovTcu, 



T OIKOVO- v6 



, ZvOa KeXfvBoi 



T', aet yevo? a 
e Mere^erepovs epiS 



II. CATALOGI FRAGMENTUM 

Sa:r<$( 8' GKarepOev laovas 



j Kal Xei/xaros aAAos 
, /zet^wv, (rrt/Sapwrepo? Iv 



dpVVfJ>VOL 'ApOoVplOV LTTiroSafJLOLO' 

Meprwvos 8' erapovs, Kparepwv a-rt^as ao-7ricrTao>v, 

^Soryv aya^os Kooyx^crev "EAetos* 
8' aywv o#i IT^AeiSea) ra^avro ^xxAayycs. 
BaAAtoAets S' Tyyev 6e6(f>w M^crrwp ajaAavros, 

3. 'Idopas, St. John's. A/cex^rwvaj, Zfow. //. xiii. 685. 

5. Fi;0r^>y, Worcester. 

8. Mere^eT^/Jous, Exeter. 
10. Xet)u,a/>, Wynter, President of St. John's. 
12. </rXeoy, Wintle, Senior Fellow of St. John's. 
15. "EXeios, marshy, Marsham, Warden of Merton, 
1 6. IfyXefSew, supporters of Peel. 
17. MTJO-TW/), the Master. 



3 o8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

M^o-rcop, os /xi/c/)bs /xev erjv 8e/xas, dAAa /xa^T^s' 

owo/xa 8' Icr^ev a/xcr/oov, d^ea^a-rov, ovS' dvo/xaoToV 

T< 8' ap eirovO' eKarbv Kat TTCVTC /xeAatvo^irwves. 20 

Dr. Fox leads 'AAX* OiOlO'tl' CCl/aCTCr' ap%7]yTl<S <TTt ^lAlTJTnj 
Queen's. ,~ ,- /, . / v , v , t v , 

TOtOrtO <PooS T]V K(pdA.Y) ' 6KO.TOV 6 V7TO TOVTO) 

i^yowes KocrprjOev fS' oySwKovra Bopeiot. 
Dr. Bridges leads 'AAX" au vw, vatovo-tv oVoi Tpta KdwTTra KaKLcrra, 

vjpus ^yejaovev' eiSws iroXepOLo Fe^v/oas, 25 

dySca/covr' apiO^ KCU aTravras <^>ato)(tT(uvas, 
J AAX' otrot ets KaOeSpyv Trcpl ~B6cnropov rj 
(fj,a.KpY)v a/x^)t7rovT9 ara^TrtTov, ov TO, 

Dean Gaisford, XappeXov rjS 'IcrtS (TV/X/^aA 
wielding two ,,^/v >J\P> / o,)>>t/ 

mighty lexica, 17 OtTTvAcOTOS tt/5 OTTl, Ot^KOCTtOt ttV KaCTTf]V 
leads Christ- jt ^\\' 

church. ave/)s ^otx i/1)<rt AiAcuojtzevoi 



, os a/xi'^trt trrt^as 
oiTrep ov Bvo y* avSpe IScc 
rAatev aTap/xvKTOicrt TrpocrwTracri, cr^juaTa Avy/oa 35 

otot vvv PporoL ti(T > , 6 8e /xtv pea TraAAe /cat oTos. 

Dr. Macbride Ot 8* ATTO/xaySaAta? K\Lvfj SdlVVVTai V 'AvA^, 

len Hall. ag & ^ots /xeya or^/xaivwv apa/3r](rev 6 IIa/>0evo7ratos' 
T^> 8' a/>a 7TvnJKOv0 J eurovro /xcAatvoxiTcovcs. 

^^vea 8' dvOputTTiav ^aA/cevrepa, ^aAKOTrpdcrwTra, 40 
Dr. Gilbert leads 8ioyevr)s FtA/^/JTos ayev TroAAot 8' V 



Brasenose. t\/ r> \/^>/ v/i \v/ 

OTrAiras pao-tA^es Koa-/xeov evfla Kat evt^a- 

1 8. otfvoiJ.a K. r. X., the uncouth name Jenkyns. 

21. $i\iinrr], Queen Philippa, Foundress of Queen's. 

22. $6os, Fox, Provost of Queen's. 

23. Bopeioi, the Scholars and Fellows of Queen's, mostly from 
northern counties. 

24. Tpia KdTTTra, C. C. C., Corpus, KdKHrra, referring to a proverb 
the three bad C's Cappadocians, Cicilians, Cretans. 

25. ye<j>vpa$, Bridges, President of Corpus. 

33. Xet*&, Suidas and Etymologicon Magnum. 
35. &Tapfj,vKToi<n, unwinking. 

38. napflej/oTratos, Macbride. &pdpi)<rev he was Professor of 
Arabic. 

41. JTiX/Seprds, Gilbert, Head of Brasenose, 



APPENDICES 



ots ^)/oeTat XaAKOvs SetVoto TreAw/oov, 
(oSJjua J3p6roi<s />iSo 
6p&b<s CTT' yx e "?S> Tre/n 
T(3vSe St^Koo-tot TroAe/xoVSe /cat etKoo~t /3atvoi>. 

SveuSet 8' L7r6fJLv 
CTTT' rav oy/xowv SeKaScs, 8ta <^V 
Ilacrwi/ IK ^v^wi/ l^BiporaTOL KOL apterrot, 



J E/< 8e KaTr^Xetov Kpa/x^/otos 5/oro Neoto, 
U Kat avrb yAwcrcr7^s /xeXtros yAvKtwv peei/ avS?) 
Trtpvcri Srjfioio TravyyvptL a,K/oiTOjav#<). 
eryv 8' era/awv, Tra/Gpos T ot IcrTrero 
Tovs 8e MeTe^eTepovs 6 MaptAat8i^s ay* ' 
f3X.ocrvpoi<Ti TT/oocrwTraatv ITTTTOKO^O 

' o? X^^ ^^ BOCTTTO/OOV a 
e'x l/ 5 'H^aKrrov Texvaoyxara, ^ecrKeAa e^oya, 
Jiv r/36a /xev x/ 3 ^ "^) T/ota 8' apyvpo^Aa TTVKTO, 
8wKe Se Boo"7ro/otots /3acriAe{i(rtv 6 KvAAoTroSt'wv 
TToAAotcrt v^eo-a-t Kat ao-ret Travrt avacrcreii/. 
TOVS jw-ev ayev 7roAe/xov8'' aAAovs 8' OI'KOI 
retxea (frpovpovvras Kat CTraA^tas 
ij/xtcru yap TCTeAecrro, TO 8' rjfjucrv yv/xvov \L<f>@r]. 



45 



Mr. Sneyd lea 
All Souls. 



Dr. Cramer lef 
New Inn H: 



Dr. Collier Joi 
leads Exet 
preceded 
five " Pokei 



60 



6 4 



43. My/cTTjp XaXxoGs 7re\c6/)ou, the brazen nose over the gate. 

47. Sveu5#, Sneyd, Warden of All Souls, noted for his long 
neck and corresponding white tie. 

51. Kpa/w^ptos, Cramer, Principal of New Inn Hall. 

55. M.api\at8tjs 'Iw^ei)s, Collier Jones, Rector of Exeter. 

58. ffXijirrpa, the bedel's staves ; he was Vice- Chancellor. 

60. Ki/XXo7ro5W, lame-foot, Vulcan. 

64. Buildings must have been going on at Exeter, probably the 
Turl front. 

The following lines about Shuttle worth were appar- 
ently never printed, but handed round in writing with 
copies of the printed piece. 



'Av8/DWi/ 8' OVK ^ 



'AtoKe/>KtV 



Dr. Shutt! 
worth (p. i( 
with his < 
on a bishop: 
stands apart 



310 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

I 
OXFORD 1 

(Seep. 1450 

O'er Oxford's halls the dewy hand of night 

Sows the still heavens with gems of lustrous light, 

Earth sinks to rest, and earthly passions cease, 

And all is love, and poesy, and peace. 

How soft o'er Wykeham's aisle and Waynflete's tower 

Falls the mild magic of the midnight hour ; 

How calm the classic city takes her rest, 

Like a hushed infant on its mother's breast ! 

How pure, how sweet, the moonbeam's silver smile 

Serenely sleeps on fair St. Mary's aisle, 

And lends each sculptured saint a chastened glow, 

Like the calm glory of their lives below. 

Now, stilled the various labours of the day, 

Student and Don the drowsy charm obey, 

E'en Pusey owns the soft approach of sleep, 

Long as his sermons, as his learning deep : 

Peaceful he rests from Hebraistic lore, 

And finds that calm he gave so oft before. 

Lo ! where on peaceful Pembroke beams the moon, 

Delusive visions lull the brains of Jeune ; 

Slowly he finds in sleep's serene surprise 

The mitred honours which the world denies ; 

Dreams of a see from earthly care withdrawn, 

And one long sabbath of eternal lawn. 

[Lacuna valde deflenda, sed ne in antiquissimo quidem 
codice suppleta.] 

1 Composed by W. W. Merry, Alfred Blomfield, Charles Bo wen, 
and J. W. Shephard, all of Balliol. 

Given to Mr. Madan in 1885 by J. R. King of Oriel, who was 
present at the composition, and himself contributed a few words. To 
Mr. Madan's kindness I owe this copy, and other valuable help. 



APPENDICES 311 

See fresh from Eton sent, the highborn dunce, 
So late a boy, now grown a man at once : 
Proud, he asserts his new-found liberty, 
And slopes in triumph down the astonished High. 
Mark the stiff wall of collar at his neck, 
More fit to choke the wearer than to deck ; 
And the long coat which, dangling at his heels, 1 
His " bags " of varied colour scarce reveals. 
So, when the infant hails the birthday grant 
Of gracious grandmother or awful aunt, 
Forth from the ark of childhood, one by one, 
The peagreen patriarch leads each stalwart son ; 
O'er Noah's knees descends the garment's hem, 
And clothes in solid folds the shins of Shem, 
His ligneous legs in modesty conceals, 
And two stout stumps alone to view reveals. 
Pleased with the sight, the infant screams no more, 
And groups his great forefathers on the floor ; 
Sucks piety and paint from broad-brimmed Ham, 
But thinks that even Japhet yields to jam. 



J 

ON CHANTREY'S CHILDREN IN 
LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL 

(Seep. 153.) 
OSBORNE GORDON. 

'A Motpa a Kpvepa TW KaAu) 7rai6 ' 

TJpTra&e' TWV KaXwv TIS KOpos <r@' " 
"AAXa (TV y 'AyyeXta, roy arjSea pvdov 



1 The long ulster-like coats which came in just then (in 1856) are 
alluded to. 



312 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 



Aeoi/ 8', <o SCU/AOV, rav KaXav wA,ras aypav, 

ov yap ras ^xas, or8e ra 
At ju,i/ yap \{/v)(ai //.eTe/^crai 

crco/mra 8' ev ycup v^y/oerov virvov e 



May be thus translated, faithfully, not adequately : 

Love's fairest twins cold Fate has rapt from earth : 

Death craves each loveliest birth. 
Go, thou, whose lore insculps the unpleasing word, 

Go to the dark-realmed Lord. 
Forbid him triumph ; his the power to slay, 

Not his to hold the prey. 
Their forms unwaking sleep beneath the sod, 

Their souls rest aye with God. 

I transcribe from a copy given to me at the time 
of its composition. In the "Anthologia Oxonensis" is an 
altered reading of line 4, BCUTK', ?0i, irayKotrav ets 'AtSao 
8o/x,ov, probably the latest correction of the author. Both 
epithets are finely classical jmeXavTeix*} Pindaric, TrayKoirav 
Sophoclean. I append a translation, the best I can 
render : it is quite inadequate as transmitting the old- 
world feeling of the original, but it is nearly literal. 
'AyyeXia, line 3, I have taken to mean the sad message 
of death inscribed in the sculptured forms. The Dean 
of Durham thinks that the somewhat tame last line (last 
but one in the translation) shows inability on Gordon's 
part to "get in" the thought he had "the souls rest in 
heaven, the bodies are immortalised in stone." 



APPENDICES 313 

K 
CARMEN l 

IN THEATRO SHELDONIANO 

NON RECITATUM 
VII. DIE JUNII, MDCCCLIII. 

(See p. 154, in which the poem is paraphrased?) 

Quern Virum aut Heroa lyra vel acri 
Tibia sumis celebrare, Clio ? 
Scilicet quern te voluere Patres 
Hebdomadales. 

Te decet jussum properare carmen, 
Ficta nam Phoebus patitur, tuisque 
Laudis indignse fidibus canoris 
Dedecus aufert. 

Jamque dicatur gravis et decorus, 
Et sibi constans memoretur idem, 
Ille, qui multis superare possit 
Protea formis. 

Quin et insignem paribus catervam 
Laudibus tollas, quibus, heu fatendum, 
Ista de nobis hodie paratur 

Pompa triumphi. 

Plura si tangas, tacuisse velles ; 
Vix enim linguae tulit eloquentis 
Praemium, verbis relevare doctus 
Praemia magnis. 

1 By Osborne Gordon ; on the Installation of Lord Derby as 
Chancellor. 



3H REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Nee magis palmam meruit decoram 
Ssevus in mitem, nimiumque vincens 
Dulce ridentem Samuelis iram 
Voce cruenta. 1 



His tamen constat decus omne nostri, 
Hie Duci magno Comes advocatur, 
Talibus flentes premimus tropaeis 
Grande sepulchrum. 

Deditis ergo gravis ille nobis 
Partium tristem trahit hue ruinam, 
Et rates obstat reparare quassas 
Isidis unda. 

Gaudeant istis pueri et puellae : 
Mente diversa notat, et Theatri 
Excipit vani sonitum maligno 
Patria risu. 

1 This refers to a passage between Lord Derby and Samuel, Bishop 
of Oxford, during a debate on the Canada Clergy Reserves in the 
House of Lords. The Bishop advocated their surrender; "Fiat 
justitia, ruat cselum," he said. Provoked by his arguments, and by 
the aggravating smile with which he met his own indignant attack, 
Lord Derby quoted the line from Hamlet, " A man may smile, and 
smile, and be a villain " (see p. 154). 



APPENDICES 315 

L 

FACSIMILE OF THE "THUNNUS" PARODY 
(Seep. 155.) 

IN A CONGREGATION to be holden on Saturday, the 31st 
instant, at Two o' Clock, the following form of Statute will be 
promulgated. 

F. JUNIUS, 

Vice-Can. 

UNIVERSITY CATACOMBS, 
Nov. 3, 1860. 



Placuit Universitati 2009. 

In Epitaphio Thunni in Musaeo Academico depositi haec verba 

THUNNUS QUEM VIDES 

MENSE JANUARII A, S. MDCCCLVII 

AB HENRICO W. ACLAND TUIMC TEMPORIS ANATOMIAE IN AEDE XTI. PRAELECTORE 

EX MADEIRA INSULA 

OUQ HENRICUM G. LIDDELL AEDIS XTI. DECANUM 

INFIRMA VALETUDINE LABORANTEM DEDUXERAT 

PRAETER OMNEM SPEM OXONIAM AOPORTATUS EST. 

TYNA ENIM NAVE VAPORARIA IN QUA REDIBAT PRAELECTOR 

AD SCTI. ALBANI PROMONTORIUM IN COMITATU DORSETIAE EJECTA, 

QUUM IPSE VIX SOSPES E FLUCTIBUS EVASIT, 
HIC PISCIS IN NAVE REUCTUS PER VOLUNTATEM NAUTARUM AD TERRAM ADVECTUS EST, 

DEINDE IN MUSAEO AEDIS XTI. POSITUS 
PER ARTEM CAROLF ROBERTSON -ESKEAETETSH. 

abrogare, et in eorum locum quse secjuuntur subrogare : 

THUNNUS QUEM RIDES 

MENSE JUNII A. S. MDCCCLX 

AB HENRICO W. ACLAND NUNC TEMPORIS MEDICINAE IN ACAD. OXON. PROFESSORS REGIO 

EX MUSAEO ANATOMICO 

DE QUO HENRICUM G. LIDDELL AEDIS XTI. DECANUM 
AETERNA MANSUETUDINE PERORANS SEDUXERAT . 
PRAETER OMNIUM SPEM OXONlENSIUM HUC ADPORTATUS EST. 

ORATIONE ENIM VAPORARIA IN QUA GAUDEBAT PROFESSOR 
AD SCTI ACLANDI GLORIAM IN CONGREGATIONEM DOCTISSIME INJECTA, 

QUUM MUSAEUM IPSUM VIX SOSPES EX HOSTIBUS EVASIT, 
HAEC AREA IGNAVE REFECTA PER SEGN1TATEM MAGISTRORUM AD FINEM PROVECTA EST, 

QUAE IN MEDl'O AEDIFICiO POSITA 
PER ARTEM BENJAMINI WOODWARD 



316 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

M 
THE STORY OF PHAETHON 

By P. N. SHUTTLEWORTH 
(Seep. 169.) 

Once upon a time, so goes the tale, 

The driver of a country mail, 

One Phoebus, had a hare-brained son, 

Called from his uncle Phaethon. 

This boy, quite spoilt with over care 

As many other children are, 

All day, it seems, would cry and sputter 

For gingerbread or toast and butter ; 

And sure no father would deny 

Such trifles to so sweet a boy. 

But that which rules all earthly things 

And coachmen warms as well as kings, 

Ambition, soon began to reign 

Sole tyrant in this youngster's brain ; 

And, as we find in every state 

The low will emulate the great, 

As ofttimes servants drink and game 

Because their lords have done the same, 

The boy, now hardly turned of ten, 

Would fain be imitating men ; 

Till what, at last, must youngster do, 

But drive the mail a day or two. 

In vain with all a father's care 

Old Phoebus tries to soothe his heir, 

In vain the arduous task explains 

To ply the lash and guide the reins, 

Tells him the roads are deep and miry, 

Old Dobbin's blind and Pyeball fiery ; 



APPENDICES 317 

At length he yields, though somewhat loath, 

And seals his promise with an oath ; 

The oath re-echoing as he sware 

Like thunder shook his elbow chair, 

Made every rafter tremble o'er him, 

And spilt the ale that stood before him. 

All then prepared in order due, 

The coach 'brought out, the horses too, 

Glad Phaethon with youthful heat 

Climbs up the box and takes his seat, 

And, scarce each passenger got in, 

Drives boldly off through thick and thin. 

Now whether he got on as well 

The sequel of my tale will tell : 

Scarce gone a mile the horses find 

Their wonted driver left behind : 

For horses, poets all agree, 

Have common sense as well as we : 

Nay, Homer tells us they can speak 

Not only common sense, but Greek. 

In vain our hero, half afraid, 

Calls all his learning to his aid, 

And runs his Houyhnhnm jargon through 

Just as he'd heard his father do 

As " Gently Dobbin, Pyeball stay, 

Keep back there Bobtail, softly, way ! " 

The more he raved and bawled and swore, 

They pranced and kicked and run the more 

Till, driver and themselves to cool, 

They lodged all safely in a pool. 

Hence then, ye highborn bards, beware, 

Nor spin your Pegasus too far, 

From Phaethon's mischance be humble, 

Go gently or the jade will stumble. 

P. N. SHUTTLEWORTH. 



Winchester College, 1800. 



3i 8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

N 

(Seep. 175.) 

This is said to have been repeated impromptu by Foote 
in order to puzzle Macklin, who boasted that he could 
re-word any tale after once hearing it : 

"The baker's wife went into the garden for a cabbage 
leaf to make an apple pie. A great she bear walking down 
the street put its head into the shop : ' What, no soap ? ' 
So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber. 
And there were present at the wedding the Piccalillies, 
the Joblillies, the Gargulies, and the great Panjandrum 
himself with the little round button on the top ; and 
they all played at Catch-who-catch-can till the gunpowder 
ran out of the heels of their boots." 



o 

(Seep. 194.) 

Hie tandem invitus requiescit 
GEORGIUS ILLE ARCHIDIACONUS DE TAUNTON 

Qui vulgo 
GEORGIUS SINE DRACONE 

Audiebat, 

Amicorum dum vivebat Delicise, 

Whiggorum, 

Radicalium, 

Rationalistarum. 

Gladstonophilorum. 

Flagrum Indefessum, Acerrimum. 

In Clericorum Convocatione 

Facundissimus, Facetissimus. 

In Baronibus 



APPENDICES 

Seu humanis et Hagleiocolis 
Sive bovinis 
Demoliendis, 

In Feriis Autumnalibus apud East Brent 
Conveniendis, 
In denegando 

De Ecclesia, De Republica, 

De omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis, 

In piscium venatione, 

Nulli secundus. 

Se ipso judice, 

Erroris Expers, 

Per Vices Rerum Quantaslibet 
Immutatus et Immutabilis. 



319 



LYTTELTON Baro fecit. Jan., 1868. 



A.D. 1910. 



Here rests at last against his will 

G. A. D., 

Known commonly as George-without-the-drag-on. 

In life the delight of his friends ; 

Of Whigs, Radicals, Gladstonians, 

The unwearied scourge. 

Eloquent in Convocation, 

Unrivalled in social charm, 

Keen Angler, universal Gainsayer, 

In his own opinion faultless, 
Unchangeable amid surrounding change. 

BY LORD LYTTELTON, 1868. 



320 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 



,ngel ? No, Ape. 



limbimg to the 
tree-top, and 
flinging the 
fruit at his 
enemies. 



fith feigned 
gravity emit- 
ting claptrap. 



'ith feigned 
sorrow beat- 
ing a gorrilla 
breast. 



ie religions and 
devout? tell it 
to his brother 
Jew, Apelles. 



DIZZY AND THE ANGELS 

By CHARLES NEATE 
(Note i, p. 199.) 

At a meeting of the Oxford Diocesan Society in the 
Theatre, November 25th, 1864, Bishop Wilberforce 
presiding, Mr. Disraeli said : " What is the question now 
placed before society with a glib assurance the most 
astounding ? The question is this Is man an ape or an 
angel ? My lord, I am on the side of the angels." 

Angelo quis te similem putaret 
Esse, vel divis atavis creatum, 
Cum tuas plane referat dolosus 
Simius artes ? 

Sive cum palma latitans in alta, 
Dente quos frustra tetigit superbo 
Dejicit fructus, nuceam procellam, 
Tutus in hostem ; 

Sive cum fictse gravitatis ore 
Comico torquet dehonesta rictu 
Turba quod risu, nimium jocosa, 
Plaudat inepto. 

Sive (quod monstrum tua novit aetas), 
Cum furens intus rabie, feroque 
Imminens bello, similis dolenti 
Pectora plangit. 

Scilicet verae pietatis ardor 
Non tulit pressis cohibere labris 
Fervidam vocem tuus ille forsan 
Credat Apella. 



APPENDICES 321 

Credidit certe plus ille noster Our " Sam " 

, , ,. feigns belief, 

Ore qui blando data verba reddit, but his tongue 

,.T * ', is in his saintly 

Non pnus nobis ita visus esse c heek. 
Credulus Oxon. 



Q 

Facsimile of letter to Charles. Girdlestone ("Com- 
mentary" Girdlestone he was called), accompanying a 
copy of the "Suggestions for an Association," written by 
Palmer of Worcester, revised by Newman, and cor- 
rected by Ogilvie. Girdlestone, whose answer follows, was 
a leading Evangelical, and had recommended Newman 
as a kindred spirit to his first curacy at St. Clement's. 
These two letters are not published in Mr. Mozley's book. 
They illustrate : (i) The wide extent of Newman's initial 
propaganda, amongst extreme Low Churchmen no less than 
in directions not inevitably hostile to the movement ; (2) 
the confident, excited temper, and defiant objurgatory 
language with which he embarked on his crusade ; (3) the 
deep instinct of opposition felt from the first by weighty 
theologians of the Clapham School, spreading and in- 
creasing as the Tracts went on, though not culminating till 
the publication of Tract 90. 



322 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 




APPENDICES 323 

C. GIRDLESTONE'S ANSWER TO J. H. NEWMAN'S 
LETTER 

SEDGELY VICARAGE, DUDLEY, 
6th Nov. 1833. 

DEAR NEWMAN, It gives me very great pain indeed to 
differ so widely as I fear I do from you in the matter to 
which your printed circular and written letter refer. Nor 
do I like to say no to your application without assigning 
one or two of the reasons which chiefly weigh with me. 

1. Your objects are indistinctly denned. "Maintain in- 
violate" looks very like to an Anti- Church- reform Society; 
though your definition goes no further than I should gladly 
go with you, being extremely averse to any change which 
" involves the denial or suppression of doctrine " (sound 
doctrine I conclude you mean) or "a departure," &c., &c. 
I honestly assure you I could not be certain whether it is 
your intent to promote any change at all, though I guess 
from the tenor of the whole paper that almost any change 
would be counted innovation. 

2. Besides this indistinctness as to your principles, I am 
at a loss to understand in what way they are to be prac- 
tically applied : whether the publication of a periodical, the 
influencing elections for M.P.'s, the putting yourselves 
under the direction of a committee in all matters connected 
with your first object, or the mere circulation of tracts. 

3. I cannot approve of the feeling which pervades your 
document, nor assent to the presumed data on which it 
proceeds. The spirit of the times does not appear to me 
in the same light as it does to you. And, the worse it is, I 
am the more desirous that in the Church at least a good 
spirit should be cultivated. Now, this whole paper breathes 
a censorious, querulous, discontented spirit, a spirit of 
defiance, unless I am much mistaken, to the party predomi- 
nant at present in the State, a spirit which is the most likely 



324 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

of all others to bring the Church into contempt with that 
party, and, what is worse, a spirit which is thoroughly 
opposite to the Christian rule of overcoming evil with good. 

I have written the more freely because I cannot but 
think it new and strange to you to write as you have 
written about the Parliament, &c., and I hope you may be 
disposed to weigh the grounds on which I have come to 
conclusions so opposite to yours. I regard the men at 
present in power as no worse Christians than their pre- 
decessors, counting no doctrine worse than that which 
sacrifices the morality of the people on the shrine of finance 
and expediency. (See Beer bill, appointment of Philpotts 
to be Bishop, defence of the venality of votes in elections, 
multiplication of oaths at Custom House, &c., &c.) I 
count them to be entitled to our respect because they are 
in power; and, without being as I trust a Vicar of Bray, I 
cannot comprehend how you reconcile the names you call 
the Parliament with the prayer you daily use for its pros- 
perity. The many grievous faults which as a Christian I 
cannot help seeing in many of their measures (not more 
than in those of their predecessors) make me the more 
anxious to conciliate their affection to the Church, and 
through the Church to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, by 
manifesting in our politico-ecclesiastical conduct that zeal 
against abuses, that self-denial, humility, and charity, which 
we preach up in private life. 

And, lastly, I have hope that much good will come of 
their schemes for Church reform, even if ill meant by them 
(which I trust they were not), for I count as the greatest 
enemies of the Church, even those to whom her present 
perils will hereafter be ascribed, the men who have winked 
at every scandalous abuse and resisted every attempt at 
reasonable amendment. 1 There now ! I take out the word 
"reform," for fear you should dislike it, though the root 
was thought a good one at the time of the Reformation. 
But call it amendment. Who for a word would quarrel with 
1 Altered from " moderate reform," 



APPENDICES 325 

a friend ? Not I, if I could help it. And earnestly I hope 
that you will not quarrel with me for this letter. I do not 
think you will, or I should scarcely have said so much. 
Yet some whom I used to know well, and still love as well 
as ever, look now askance when they meet me in their path, 
for no other reason that I know of than that I thought ten 
pound voters better than close boroughs, and have also 
publicly maintained that a Dissenter may get to Heaven, 
and ought to be treated as a brother Christian whilst on 
earth. Do, dear Newman, well consider where you are 
going in this business, and do not, as you threaten, march 
past me, unless you are quite sure that you will not here- 
after wish to march back again. 

Many thanks for your help in searching for an incumbent 
for my church at Sedgley. I have as yet made no appoint- 
ment. It is by the conscientious discharge of our duties 
in our cures, by the due disposal of our patronage, and by 
the exercise of self-denial in preferment offered to ourselves, 
that I hope we may silence the gainsayers, or, if not, yet 
justify the Church. I would gladly enter into an associa- 
tion for these objects, if we were not by our vows as 
ministers and as Christians already members of just such 
a society. Ever Yours, C. GIRDLESTONE. 

Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Oriel College. 



R 

THE GRAND UNIVERSITY LOGIC STAKES 

(See p. 267.) 

Late in the Summer Term of 1849 we noticed lying in 
Vincent's and Macpherson's windows a slim anonymous 
pamphlet labelled " Grand University Logic Stakes." It was 
one of the two most brilliant topical jeux d 1 esprit which the 



326 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

century produced in Oxford, the other being Jackson and 
Sinclair's Uniomachia of 1833. It described a recent con- 
test for the Praelectorship of Logic, which, founded in 
1839, na d been held during ten years by Richard Michell, 
and was to be rilled again by election to a second decennial 
occupancy. It was written, unavowedly, by Landon, Fel- 
low of Magdalen, and Examiner in the Great-Go Schools : 
its felicitous personal characterisations of men notable then 
and since were heightened by their dexterous adaptation to 
the language of the Turf; for Landon, a Yorkshireman 
born, was, like Henry Blount in " Marmion," a sworn horse- 
courser, and an adept in stable slang. The skit is now 
extremely scarce, and the rust of time has settled on the 
original polish of its allusive wit and fun ; but, as having 
been coeval and conversant with its actors, I have ap- 
pended a Notularum Spicilegium. 

It unfolds and advertises the 

" GRAND UNIVERSITY LOGIC STAKES of 250 sovs., for 
Horses of all ages above three years, without restriction 
as to weight or breeding. Ten-mile course. Gentlemen 
riders. Second Decennial Meeting to come off June 14, 
1849. 

" The following are the entrances up to present date : 

1. Mr. Bailly Jenks's b. c. Barbadoes, 17 yrs. . . . B. Jowett. 

2. Mr. St. John's bl. c. Mainsail, 6 yrs Higgs. 

3. Lord Oriel's ch. c. Christmas, 8 yrs Buggon. 

4. Her Majesty's br. c. Tom Towzer, 16 yrs. . . . Barrott. 

This great and important race, which afforded so much 
sport to the academical world in 1839, is now on the 
eve of being contested for the second time since its 
institution by that sporting chief, the illustrious Gilbert. 
The stakes are raised by capping the junior members of 
the University to the amount of sixpence a head, which 
yields a fund of nearly 250 sovs., liable to a heavy de- 



APPENDICES 327 

duction for expense of collection, which may, however, 
possibly be reduced to a more reasonable percentage. 

" Previously to entering on the merits of the competition, 
it may not be uninteresting to take a brief survey of the 
subsequent history and performances of the horses en- 
gaged in the memorable struggle of 1839. For that 
race, it may be remembered, eight horses were entered: 
St. Michael, Gruel, The White Horse Bob, Lancastrian, 
Reformation, Barrister, Stockbroker, and Barbadoes. 

" St. Michael, the winner on that occasion, has proved 
by his late successes that his merits had not been over- 
rated, and it may be mentioned, as a proof of the steady 
confidence of his admirers, that he has been a prime 
Favourite as well as a successful runner for the different 
races he has since contested. He won the Rhetorical 
Sweeps in a common canter; and as far as credit was 
to be derived from such an event, put in a most re- 
spectable appearance for the Bampton Stakes, which is 
generally a slow race for aged horses and heavy weights, 
rarely accomplished under the hour ; the nominations being 
often confined to somewhat inferior cattle. St. Michael 
has lately been purchased by an elderly gentleman at a 
very high figure. He is located in a very snug stable, 
and is already the sire of some very promising stock. 

" Gruel continues to make a show in the world, and 
stands high in public estimation. He has taken to a 
novel line, in which he has come out rather strong. 
He appears to have left the Turf altogether for the 
present. After a long season in Ireland, where, not- 
withstanding several influential backers, he appears to 
have been a failure, he returned to the Marquis of 
Exeter's stables. His Lordship still drives him in his 
four-in-hand, giving him an cccasional day's work at 
Radley Farm, where he goes to plough and drill on a 
new system with an Irish horse called Single-Peeper. 

"The White Horse Bob has been shipped off to the 



328 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Antipodes to improve the breed in Her Majesty's Colonies. 
He is already said to have attracted considerable notice 
among judges in those quarters. 

" Lancastrian , though now an aged horse, has of late 
displayed evidences of more than ordinary vigour. 

" Reformation. This fine old horse still works his coach 
with his usual regularity. On the death of his late master 
he fell into the hands of a deputation from the Parent 
Society, by whom, we are happy to hear, he is driven 
gently and kindly treated. 

"Barrister. Little has been heard of this horse since 
the meeting of 1839. He may possibly have been at 
work in the Metropolitan Conveyance department. He 
is undoubtedly a superior animal if he would work steadily. 
He walked over the other day for one of Her Majesty's 
Plates, which will entail upon him a good deal of public 
running, from which much is anticipated. 

" Stockbroker. Turned out to grass at the expense of 
the University, which had no other provision for him. 
He has lately had a sack or two of corn sent down, to 
keep up his spirits. 

" Barbadoes is the last horse on the old list, and the 
first on the new one. He is the only one of the old lot 
who has had pluck enough to run again. Not long after 
the last race he changed owners, Mr. Bailly Jenks having 
purchased him from A. Hall, Esq., for 300 sovs. and 
half his future earnings. It is gratifying to find that he 
has fallen into such good hands, as Mr. Jenks is one 
of the most sporting men in the University. His annual 
meeting in November for the Foal Stakes is always well 
attended, honestly run, and better contested than any 
similiar race in the University. He is no less wide 
awake in drafting off an unsound or suspicious animal 
than in getting hold of good ones to begin with. Three 
winners out of four in the last University Trial Stakes 
are no small proof of the excellence of Mr. Bailly Jenks's 



APPENDICES 329 

training establishment. A little more sweating of the 
young ones on the Catechetical Course is the only 
decided improvement that might be made, as they have 
been on several occasions very much distressed for want 
of this kind of exercise. Some persons fancy it does 
not signify, because they see horses who have quite 
shut up at this part of the course go ahead before the 
end of the race. Be that as it may, it gives a respectable 
finish to the style of the cleverest winner. The great 
merit of Barbadoes is his age and steadiness. There 
is no danger of his bolting over the ropes or causing 
any disturbance on the course ; and there is little doubt 
but that Mr. Jenks's well-known colours, the yellow body 
and pink sleeves, will be seen well forward in the race. 
There are rather heavy books against Christmas, Tom 
Towzer, and Mainsail. Barbadoes is free from this dis- 
advantage; but on the other hand, many sportsmen 
prefer to see a good book made up before they back 
a horse to any great amount. 

"We have now to make a few remarks on the three 
new horses who are to come before the public on the 
present occasion, namely the following : 

"Her Majesty's brown colt Tom Towzer, a dark horse, 
but one who has a great many friends on the ground 
of his careful training for this particular event. He ran for 
the University Trial Stakes in 1840, and came out only 
a third. Some persons were of opinion that he was 
amiss at the time, but whether it was so or not, he has 
had ample opportunity since then to mend his pace and 
improve his action. It may be a question whether his 
style is not too high and too much of the canter for a 
University Logic Race. Mr. Samuel Cudsdon, whose 
attachment to everything connected with royalty would 
naturally ensure his support to her Majesty's horse, has 
backed him strongly, and is supposed to have a pot 
of money depending on the event. 



330 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

" Mr. St. John's Mainsail. A cocky little horse, full 
of fun and frolic, but warranted free from vice. His per- 
formances have hitherto been first rate, and he is strongly 
backed by that eminent sportsman, Sir William Hamilton. 
He is a horse of undeniable merit and lasting power : has 
been known, even in hot weather, to work a coach for 
twelve hours a day, without delay or disappointment to the 
passengers. He is admirably supported by his owner, who 
backs him in the most spirited manner. His jockey is 
sure to do him justice, if we may judge from the way in 
which he put along that slow old horse, Grey Roundabout, 
for the Members' Plate. N.B. Mainsail's friends are re- 
spectfully informed that the proceedings of the day will be 
concluded by a first-rate ordinary at the Lamb and Flag. 

" Lord Oriel's Christmas. A very fine colt, got by the 
Provost out of Brascinia. Like Tom Towzer's, his 
action is perhaps a touch too high, but he is one of 
the right sort for this kind of race. Some had objected 
to his rider as too heavy, and a trifle long in the leg ; 
but he carried him uncommonly well on the way 
from Worcester right into Lord Oriel's stable, running 
bang over a poor fellow of the name of Smith, who 
happened to be in the way. 'Tap the Physic,' and 
'The Shady Cloud,' have somewhat shaken public 
confidence in this stable by their recent performances; 
and there have been other melancholy instances of un- 
soundness amongst Lord Oriel's horses, arising possibly 
from over-training. His Lordship has done all that 
man could do to keep them on their legs; and in 
refusing a warranty to the Marquis of Exeter, when 
he purchased Shady Cloud a few seasons back, gave 
ample proofs of the correctness of his judgment and 
the honesty of his conduct. Many sporting men of high 
reputation would be glad to see Christmas a winner, 
but the general impression is that the race will be 
among the other three. 



APPENDICES 331 

" The following is the latest quotation of the odds : 

" 3 to 2 against Barbadoes. 
2 to i against Mainsail. 
4 to I against Tom Towzer. 
15 to i against Christmas. 

" Gentlemen proposing to be present at the race are in- 
formed that everything has been arranged with a view to 
their comfort and convenience by the Vice-Chancellor and 
the Proctors, under the able superintendence of Mr. P. 
Bliss, the much respected Clerk of the Course. On entering 
the Grand Stand they are earnestly requested not to push 
one another more than is absolutely necessary, as there is 
plenty of accommodation for all. 

"The thanks of the University are due to the owners of 
St. Michael for not starting him on the present occasion, 
as, in case of his appearance, this exciting race might have 
shared the fate of the Lady Margaret Stakes, and de- 
generated into a dull, periodical walk over. 

" Postscript. 

"Friday morning, June 15. The following is the result 
of the race, decided yesterday : 

"Mr. Bailly Jenks's br. c. Barbadoes, 17 years (B. Jowett), I. 
Mr. St. John's b. c. Mainsail, 6 years (Higgs), II. 
Her Majesty's br. c. Tom Towzer, 16 years (Barrott), III. 
Lord Oriel's ch. c. Christmas, 8 years (Buggon), drawn." 

Here ended Landon's jeu d* esprit. It remains to ex- 
plain the allusions. The 1849 candidates were Barbadoes, 
Mainsail, Christmas, Tom Towzer. 

The brown colt Barbadoes was Henry Wall of Balliol, 
born in that island. Jenks was the irreverent sobriquet 
of Dr. Jenkyns, Master of Balliol. Wall was proposed 
by Jowett. The black colt Mainsail was H s L. Mansel 
of St. John's, afterwards Dean of St. Paul's, proposed 
by Dr. Higgs of the same College. The chestnut colt 



332 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Christmas was C. P. Chretien of Oriel, proposed by 
Burgon. Her Majesty's brown colt Tom Towzer was 
Thomas Bowser Thompson of Queen's. His proposer 
was Barrow of Queen's, Principal of St. Edmund's Hall, a 
learned cheery little man, but a strong Tractarian ; while 
the Hall, long under the influence of Daniel Wilson, had 
become a nursery of Evangelicals. He soon resigned, 
went abroad, and died a Jesuit. The years represent each 
man's years of residence. 

The "sporting chief" was Ashurst Turner Gilbert, 
Principal of Brasenose, in whose Vice-Chancellorship 
the " Readership," as it was originally called, came into 
existence. He was made Bishop of Chichester in 1842. 
The salary of ,250 was to be provided by a small 
payment from every member of the University, servitors 
excepted, under the degree of M.A. The arrangement 
did not answer, was abandoned, and is here ridiculed. 

The eight horses for the 1839 race had been St. Michael, 
Gruel, The White Horse Bob, Lancastrian, Reformation, 
Stockbroker, Barbadoes. 

St. Michael was Richard Michell, Reader in Logic 
during the ten previous years. The " Rhetorical Sweeps " 
was the post of Public Orator, which he had for some 
time held. While delivering the Crewe Oration from 
the rostrum at Commemoration he used to gesticulate 
with his cap. I remember once his extending it with 
an animated flourish, when an undergraduate in the 
gallery just above him dropped a halfpenny into it. 
By the "Bampton Stakes" was meant, of course, the 
Bampton Lectureship, which he held in 1849. His 
sermons, which I dutifully attended, were extraordinarily 
tedious. The elderly gentleman was Macbride, Principal 
of Magdalen Hall. He was very learned, very ugly, and 
the only Head besides Marsham of Merton who was 
not in Orders. When Gandell, the Chaplain, was late 
for or absent from Chapel, the old man, though a lay- 



APPENDICES 333 

man, used to read the entire service himself. He had 
made Michell Vice-Principal in succession to Jacobson, 
who became Regius Professor of Divinity. 

Gruel was an amusingly apt name for William Sewell 
of Exeter. The " novel line " refers to his editing his sister 
Elizabeth's religious novels, "Amy Herbert," "Margaret 
Percival," and the rest, eagerly read once, now, I fear, 
forgotten. He wrote also himself a hysterical novel called 
" Hawkstone." His " season in Ireland '' was spent in 
the foundation of St. Columba's College; the " influential 
backers " were Lord Adare, the Primate Lord John 
Beresford, and Dr. Todd of Trinity College, Dublin. He 
broke away from this enterprise, nobody quite knew why, 
and transferred his energies to Radley. Single-Peeper was 
Singleton, its first Warden. 

The White Horse Bob was Bob Lowe of Magdalen, 
an Albino with snowy hair. He was a popular Class Coach, 
but left Oxford for Australia, returning after a distinguished 
career to become a member of Mr. Gladstone's Government, 
and to be made Lord Sherbrook. His first wife was 
a Miss Orrid. It was said to be an " 'Orrid Low match." 

Lancastrian was T. W. Lancaster, formerly Fellow of 
Queen's, who lived in Oxford, an elderly man with an 
elderly wife, for a time Usher of the Magdalen Choristers, 
and frequently Examiner in the Little-Go Schools. The 
" evidence of more than ordinary vigour " refers to 
sermon he had preached before the University, in which 
he had spoken of Hampden as " that atrocious Professor." 
He was severely censured by his College, and published a 
lengthy pamphlet in self-defence. 

Reformation was John Hill, Vice-President of St. 
Edmund's Hall. His " late master " was Principal Grayson, 
who died in 1843; a ponderous being with a handsome 
wife much younger than himself. He is mentioned 
contumeliously in " Black Gowns and Red Coats." The 
" deputation from the Parent Society " was W. Thompson of 



334 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

Queen's, who succeeded Grayson at the Hall, and was 
an ardent supporter of the Church Missionary Society. 
Herein Hill was strongly in accord with his chief, being 
always appointed to receive the Society's deputation at 
the Oxford meetings. He was the recognised leader of 
the Low Church party, giving tea-parties to like-minded 
undergraduates once or twice a week at his house in 
the High, where pietistic talk, prayer, exposition, and 
hymnody were lightened by the presence of his four 
charming daughters. 

Barrister was Henry Halford Vaughan. Fellow of Oriel. 
He had left Oxford to practice at the Chancery Bar, 
the "Metropolitan Conveyance." "Her Majesty's Plate" 
was the Regius Professorship of Modern History, to which 
Vaughan was appointed in 1848. His high reputation 
drew at first large audiences to the Theatre, but his lectures 
were too condensed and close in texture to be followed 
easily by the casually-minded undergraduate, nor was there 
at that time any Modern History School to stimulate 
serious study. 

Stockbroker was Dr. C. W. Stocker of St. John's. He had 
been " turned out to grass " on a country living in the gift 
of Convocation. The " sack of corn " was a grant of 
money bestowed on him by the University for some 
parochial purpose. 

Barbadoes^ as we have said, was Henry Wall. By his 
" change of owners " is meant his election to a Bursary and 
Fellowship at Balliol from St. Alban Hall, of which he was 
Vice-Principal. The "Foal Stakes" was, of course, the 
annual contest for the Balliol Scholarships. The " drafting 
off" meant expulsion from the College; two recent 
instances gave point to the passage. The " three winners 
out of four " were James Hornby, afterwards Head Master 
of Eton, Henry Smith, Professor, and Curator of the 
Museum, and William Warburton, now Canon of Win- 
chester. The "Catechetical Course" was the viva voce 



APPENDICES 335 

examination in Divinity for Greats ; in this several Balliol 
men had shown weakness. Jenks's colours, " yellow body 
and pink sleeves," commemorate the nickname " Yellow 
Belly" borne by Dr. Jenkyns's butler, almost as notable 
a character as his master, and arrayed always in a 
protuberant canary-coloured waistcoat. 

Tom Towzer was Thomas Bowser Thompson of Queen's, 
a "dark horse," because, being idle in his younger days, 
he obtained only a third in Greats. Samuel Cudsdon 
was Bishop Wilberforce, who energetically supported 
Thompson. Those who remember Mansel will appreciate 
the description of Mainsail. He was the exponent in 
Oxford of Sir William Hamilton's philosophy. His coach- 
ing for twelve hours a day was one of the ben trovato myths 
which sprang up round him and Jowett. When Fearon of 
Balliol, afterwards H. M. Inspector of Schools, was within 
six or seven weeks of the Schools, he went to Wall with his 
Logic. Wall examined and dismissed him, "could not in 
so short a time make up for previous neglect." Jowett 
heard of it and sent for him. " I hear Mr. Wall gives you 
up ; I will undertake you, if you like. I am engaged always 
till 12 at night, but if you like to come to me from 12 till i, 
I will do the best I can." For six weeks the midnight work 
went on ; then said Jowett, " I think you may face the exa- 
miners now" and Fearon got his First. A "Jowler 
myth " most likely, but showing the estimation in which he 
was held. Hansel's " owner " was President Wynter ; his 
"jockey" was little Dr. Higgs, who had been an active 
canvasser for Charles Grey Round, "Grey Roundabout," 
a parliamentary candidate for Oxford University in 1847. 
The " Lamb and Flag " were the armorial bearings of St. 
John's ; a big dinner was given in Hall after the voting to 
all the St. John's supporters of Mansel. 

G. P. Chretien of Oriel, Christmas, had been elected to 
a Fellowship from Brasenose (Brascinia). His rider was 
Burgon, whose queer person was supported by two un- 



336 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD 

usually " long legs." He had been elected from Worcester 
to an Oriel Fellowship over the head of Goldwin Smith ; 
is it not written, acrimoniously, in Mark Pattison's 
" Memories " ? " Tap the Physic " was Clough, a play on 
Toper- na-Fuosich. "Shady Cloud" was Froude, whose 
"Shadows of the Clouds by Zeta" had been published 
in 1847. He afterwards suppressed it. The "instances 
of unsoundness" refers to the Newmanian secessions. 
Hawkins refused a testimonial, or " warranty, " to Froude 
when he stood for, and was elected to, a Fellowship at 
Exeter. 

The "Clerk of the Course" was Dr. Philip Bliss, Uni- 
versity Registrar. The " Grand Stand " was the Divinity 
School, where the voting arrangements were outrageously 
inconvenient. I remember once, when we were struggling 
to record our votes, Archdeacon Bartholomew, at the far 
end of the room, shouting a pathetic appeal to the Vice- 
Chancellor, Dr. Williams, who answered that unless the 
gentleman should hold his peace, he would send a bedel to 
remove him. 

The " Lady Margaret Stakes " was the Margaret Professor- 
ship of Divinity, then a biennial appointment, but renewed 
as a matter of course. It had long been held by Dr. 
Fausset. 



S 
THE WHITEHALL PREACHERSHIPS 

For this interesting history of an extinct but once 
famous institution I am indebted, as for much besides, 
to Dr. Farrar of Durham. 

Oxford being disloyal to the House of Hanover, 
Walpole advised George II. to summon Oxford divines 
to preach before him, as an endeavour to conciliate the 
University. It being pointed out that this would be 



APPENDICES 337 

looked upon as a slight to Cambridge, it was determined 
to take from each University twelve resident College 
Fellows, each in turn to preach once a fortnight, and 
their appointment to be permanent so long as their 
residence continued. It was found, however, after a time 
that the abler Fellows, passing away from the Universities, 
ceased to hold their office; while men unmarried and 
unpromoted stayed on obsolete and senile. One of these 
was Griffith. Howley, when Bishop of London, hearing 
complaints of his preaching, went to hear him, and found 
him worse than he had thought possible. After service 
he followed him into the vestry. " Mr. Griffith, I want to 
speak to you about your sermon." Bowing low, Griffith 
replied : " I beg that your Lordship will not do so : it 
is a sufficient compliment to me that you should be 
present ; I cannot bear to hear your commendation of 
the sermon." Howley went away discomfited; and 
ascending to Canterbury soon after, bequeathed the 
difficulty to his successor Blomfield. He attempted inter- 
ference, and was in his turn foiled by Mo.; but as the 
Whitehall Chapel Royal, in which the sermons were 
delivered, needed extensive repair, he took the opportunity 
of dismissing all the preachers ; and when two years later 
the Chapel was reopened, obtained the Queen's consent 
to a change of system, appointing two resident Fellows, 
one from each University, to preach month by month 
for two years only, with a salary of ^300 a year from 
the Queen's privy purse. Of course, Mo. was not re- 
appointed : he used to come to the Chapel, seat himself 
in some corner which the preacher's voice ordinarily failed 
to reach, and say aloud from time to time " I cannot 
hear a word." 



INDEX 



Abernethy, 65 

Acland, Sir H. (Dr.), 33, 37, 45, 

&c., 52, 58, 142, 154, 315 
Acland, Sir T., sen., 89, 91 
Acland, Sir T., jun., 84, 85, 86, 88, 

&c., 217, 262 
Adams, W., 85, 169 
Adare, Lord, 278 
Adelaide, Queen, 4 
Albert, Prince, 267 
Aldrich, Dean, 71 
Alford, Dean, 249 
Allbutt, Professor, 1 1 1 
Allen (of Holland House), 142 
Angelo (fencer), 107 
Argyll, Duke of, 241 
Armitstead, W. G., 201 
Arnold, Dr., 182, 183, 193, 195, 

210, 211, 218, 231 
Arnold, Matthew, 97, 110,121, 184, 

283, 284 
Atterbury, Charles, 145 



B 

Badcock, 15 

Baden Powell, Professor, 18, 42, 49 

Baden Powell, Mrs., 17 

Bagot, Bishop, 129 

Baker, G. W., 35 

Balfour, Professor, 58 

Bandinel, Dr., 161, 170 

Banks, Sir J., 36 

Barnes, Dr., 129 



Bartlett, R. E., 109, 247 

Batchelor, Eleanor, 290 

Bathurst, Stewart, 269 

Bathurst, W., 19 

Baxters (gardeners), 34 

Baxter (printer), 293 

Bayliss, Judge, 72 

Bayly, E. G., of Pembroke, 153 

Bennett (St. Paul's, Knightsbridge), 

143 

Bennett (Rugby Tonsor), 217 
Benson, Archbishop, 272 
Beresford, Lord J., 278 
Besant, Walter, in 
Bethell (Lord Westbury), 198 
Bishop, Sir Henry, 73, 81 
Bishop (of the Angel), 291 
Blachford, Lord, 153 
Blackstone, Charles, 244 
Blagrave (Magdalen), 163 
Blagrove (violinist), 76 
Blanco White* 185, 262 
Bland, Archdeacon, 216 
Blaydes. See Calverley 
Bliss, Dr., 152, 162 
Blomfield, Bishop, 27, 275, 337 
Blomfield, A., 310 
Bloxam, Dr., 170 
Bloxam, Matthew, 84, 165 
Blyth (organist), 77 
Bockh, Professor, 126 
Bode (Christchurch), 150, 155 
Boone, Shergold, 115 
Bothie, 98, 120, 305, and see 

Clough 



339 



340 



INDEX 



Bourne, Dr., 63 

Bouverie, 137 

Bowen, Ch., 310 

Boyle, Dean, 275 

Boxall, Miss, 7 

Bradley, Dean, 272 

Brancker, Tom, 174, &c. 

Brasenose Ale, 94 

Bree, Archdeacon, 28 

Brereton, Canon, 89, 217 

Bridges, President, 239, 308 

Bridges (Fellow of Corpus), 239, &c. 

Bright, John, 199 

Brodie, Sir B., sen., 56, 65 

Brodie, Sir B., jun., 57, 58, 98 

Brookfield (Cambridge), 86 

Browning, 2 

Bruno, Dr., 270 

Buckland, Dr., 36, &c.,48, 49, 141 

Buckland, Mrs., 38 

Buckland, Frank, 37, 38, 39, 41, 

1 06, &c. 
Buckley, 108 
Bucknill, "Hip-hip," 232 
Bull, Dr., 26, &c. 
Buller, Charles, 86 
Bulteel, 268 
Bulwer Lytton, 69 
Bunsen, Baron, 90, 147 
Burgon, 54, 190, 233, 241, 243, 273 
Burne-Jones, 51 
Burney, Miss, 9, 72 
Burrows, Commander, 296 
Burrows, Sir G., 65 
Burton, "Jack and Tom," 7 
Butler (of Shrewsbury), 206, 215 
Butler, Bishop, 213, 265 
Byron, 127, 303 



Cain and Abel, 252 
Calverley, 109, &c., 247 



Canning, G., 7, 69 

Canning, Lord, 36, 185 

Cardwell, Mrs., 52 

Cardwell, M. R., 95 

Carlyle, 56, 92, 222 

Carroll, Lewis, 155, &c. 

Cecil, Lord R., 227 

Chamberlain, " Tom," 108 

Chambers (Magdalen), 164 

Chambers (Proctor), 192 

Chapman, President, 224 

Chapman (naturalist), 42 

Charles I., 163, 296 

Charlotte, Queen, 131 

Chase, Dr., 126, 242 

Chretien (Oriel), 134 

Church, Dean, 85, 153, 224 

Clarence, Duke of, 102 

Clark (Taunt on), 193 

Claughton, Bishop, 84, 224, 238 

Clemend (violinist), 76 

Clifton (Brasenose), 72 

Clough, 97, &c., 126, 184, 196, 205 , 

212 

Cole, W. G., 224, 225 
Cole (Papirius Carbo), 225, 230 
Colenso, Bishop, 209 
Coleridge, S. T., 2, 117 
Coleridge, Herbert, 117, &c. 
Coleridge, Sara, 117 
Coles, Henry, 175 
Collins (the poet), 258 
Combe (of the Clarendon), 49 
Compton (Rugby master), 272 
Congreve (Wadham), 121 
Conington, John, 104, 105, 206, 207, 

222, 276 
Conybeare, 276 
Copeland, 29, 224 
.Copleston, Provost, 16, 17, 121, &c. 
Corfe, Dr., 77 
Corfe, Mrs., 51, 77 
Corfe, Charles, 51 



INDEX 



Costar, 4, 145 

Cotton (Rugby master), 197 

Cotton , Dr. , frontispiece 

Cotton, Archdeacon, 127 

Cowie, Dean, 219 

Cox, George, 114, 170 

Cox, Hay ward, 254, 271 

Cox, John, 114 

Cox, Valentine, 118, 243 

Coxe, Henry, 163, 242, 243 

Crabbe, 2 

Cramer, Dr., 116, 309 

Cross, 241 

Crotch, Dr., 73 

Crowe (Orator), 171, 172 

Cure, Capel, 220 

D 

Dale, J., 300 

Dalhousie, Lord, 85 

Dalton, Reginald, 60 

Damien, Father, 186 

Darnel (of Corpus), 1 6 

Darwin fight, 52, 56, 139 

Daubeny, Dr., 31, &c., 49, 54, 57, 

163, 164, 289 
Davies, "Tom," 21 
Davison, 17 
Davy, Sir H., 41 
Deane, Sir T., 56 
Deichmann, 148 
Delane, 51 
Denison, Archdeacon, 179, 181, 191, 

&c., 318 

Denison, Bishop, 268, 269 
Derby, Lord, 49, 102, 154, 304, 

" 3H 

Detenus, 24, 173 
Dibdin, T. F., 12 
Dickens, 2 

Dickinson (novelist), 85 
Dindorf, 125 



Disraeli, 199, 320 

Dolby, Madame, 155 

Dolling, Father, 186 

Dollinger, 228 

Donkin, Professor, 72, 98 

Dons, 19 

Douglas, Helen, 127 

Doyle, Sir F., 86 

Draper, Professor, 54 

Driffield (musical amateur), 72 

Dunbar, 12, &c., 116, 299 

Duncans, the brothers, 115, 170 

Duncan, Phil., 35, 175, 



East wick, 23 

Eden (Oriel), 63, 179, 190, &c. 

Egerton, Sir P., 37 

Elgin, Lord, 85 

Ellerton, Dr., 22 

Elvey, George, 74 

Elvey, Stephen, 73 

Eothen. See Kinglake 

Erie, Christopher, 6, 122, 123, 172 

Erie, Sir W., 5, 17 

Erie, T. W., 240 

Evans, Dr. S., 215, 272 

Evans ( Pembroke), 242 

Eveleigh, Provost, 186 

Everett, U.S. minister, 151 

Exmouth, Lord, 24, 241 



Faber, Frank, 116, 160, 164, 165 
Faber, " Waterlily," 116, 169 
Fanshawe, Catherine, 67, 99, 303 
Fanshawe, Frederick, 272 
Faussett, R., 286 
Faussett, T., 247, &c. 
Fichie, 222 
Fitzroy, Admiral, 55 



342 



INDEX 



Foote, 175 
Foulkes, Dr., 7 
Foulkes, Mrs., 7 
Foulkes, E. S., 101 
Fox (Queen's), 308 
Freeman, J. A., 102, 105 
Freytag, Professor, 135 
Froude, H., 116, 121, 142, 186, 292 
Froude, J. A., 185, 262, 276 
Frowd, Dr., 12, 24, &c., 241 
Furneaux, Henry, 48, 99, 120, 240, 
245, &c., 286 



Gabriel, Dr., 15 

Gaisford, Dean, 37, 71, 106, 116, 
i*3, fee. 

Gaisford, Miss, 126 
Garbett, Professor, 152, 225 
Gardiner, S., 126 
George, " Mother," 290 
Gilbert, Dr., 14, 98, 225, 308 
Giles, Archdeacon, 94 
Girdlestone, Charles, 321 
Gladstone, 60, 61, 85, 86, 115, 

202, 228 
Goethe, 221, 255 
Goldsmith, 213 

Goodenough (Christchurch), 128 
Goodsir, Professor, 46 
Goose, " Mother," 290 
Gordon, Osborne, 53, 120, 127, 

155, &c., 311, 313 
Gore, Bishop, 214 
Goss, Dr., 8 1 
Goulburn, Dean, 141, 217, 231, 

269, &c. 

Grant, Archdeacon, 170 
Grantham, G., 75 
Granville, Lady, 7 
Gray, 258, 260 
Green, T. H., 118, 221, &c. 



Green, "Paddy," 198 

Greg, 214 

Gregorians, 76 

Gregorie, David, 66 

Grenville, Lord, 37 

Greswell, E., 7, 240 

Greswell, R., 54 

Griffith, Mo., 12, 27, &c., 336 

Griffiths (Wadham), 49 

Grote, 133 

Guidotti, 291 

Guillemard (Proctor), 153, 244 

Gutch, J., 289 

Gutch, Sarah, 289 

H 

Hacker, Marshall, 8, 162 

Haggitt (Wegg Prosser), 286 

Hallam, A., 84, 86, 121 

Halle, 72 

Hamilton, Bishop, 28, 85, 86, 268, 

289 

Hammond (Merton), 7 
Hampden, Bishop, 18, 100, 244, 275 
Hancock (Christchurch porter), 126 
Hardy, Gathorne, 60, 61 
Hare, Archdeacon, 264 
Harington (Brasenose), 123 
Hascoll, Captain, 279 
Hawes, Miss, 226 
Hawkins, Provost, 18, 126, 179, 

186, &c., 192 
Heathcote, W. B., 50, 175 
Henderson, Dean, 165 
Hendry, Abel, 17 
Henslow, Professor, 34, 53, 57 
Herbert, Algernon, 139 
Herbert, Edward, 138 
Herostratus, 162 
Hewlett (chorister), 75, 82 
Hewlett (novelist), 85 
Hext (Corpus), 25, 241, &c. 



INDEX 



343 



Hibbert, Julian, 136 

Hill,J., 96, 271 

Hinds, Howell, 18, 182 

Hobhouse, Bishop, 269 

Hobhouse, Lord, 98 

Hodgkinson, J., 300 

Hodson, Frodsham, 201 

Holland, Lady, 142 

Holland, J. M., 81 

Holme (Corpus), 27 

Hooker, Sir J., 56 

Hope (Museum), 48, 58, 59 

Hope, Scott, 85, 89 

Horseman, Miss, 9, &c., 66, 175, 

179, I9i 

Hoskins, "Mad," 172 

Hounslow, 269 

Howard, G., 235 

Howard (of Radley), 278 

Howe, Lord, 5 

Howley, Archbishop, 27, 37, 275, 

336 

Hubbard, 281 
Hughes (artist), 52 
Hughes, George, 1 14, 194, 196, 242 
Hughes, Tom, 114, 194, &c. 
Hughes, J. W., 287 
Hullah, 76 
Hunt, Holman, 49 
Hussey, R., 126, 150 
Huxley, 53, &c., 210, 228 



I 

Ingram, President, 116, 223, 224 
Ireland, Dr., 63, 64 
Irving, of Balliol, 119, 188 

J 

Jackson, Cyril, 124, 125 
Jackson, of the Uniomachia, 94 
Jacobson, Dr., 167, 275 



James (confectioner), 291 

Jeffs, " Mother," 290 

Jelf, Dr., 1 30 

Jelf, W. E., 76, 132, 150, &c. 

Jenkyns, Dr., 116, 200 

Jenner (Magdalen), 162 

Jephson, Dr., 233 

Jeune, Dr., 51, 144, 310 

Johnson, Dr., 24, 140, 144, 166, 

213 

Johnson, Manuel, 49, 184 
Jones, Collier, 275, 309 
Jowett, 54, 98, 121, 188, 202, 212, 

222, 228, 253, &c., 259, 261 
Joy, " Parson," 292 
Jubber, 292 
Jullien, 76 



Karslake, W. H., 29, 242 

Keble, J., 2, 17, 37, 184, 225, 

292, 293 

Kett, "Horse," 15, &c., 224 
Kidd, Dr., 16, 47, 62, 63 
Kidd, Misses, 63 
King, J. R., 310 
Kinglake, A. W., 80, 212 
Kingsley, Charles, 148, 195 
Kingsley, Henry, 1 19 
Kitchin, Dean, 150, 312 



Lake, Dean, 182, 185, 187, 188, 

196, 205, &c., 269, 271 
Lancaster, Harry, 206 
Lancaster (of Queen's), 158 
Landon (Magdalen), 277, 296 
Land or, Savage, 16 
Lang, A., 287 

Latimer (wine merchant), 293, 300 
Laud's tree, 296 



344 



INDEX 



Le Mesurier, 286 

Lee, Harriett, 67 

Lee, Lancelot, 173, 174 

Lee, President, 237 

Lee, Miss, 232 

Leonard, 65 

Levett (Christchurch), 128 

Lewis (Jesus), 151 

Ley, Jacob, 150, 253 

Liddell, 37, 85, 117, 145, 154, 

i6>o,1foi, 202, 315 
Liddon, 134 
Linwood, Miss, 150 
Linwood, Professor, 150 
Litton, " Donkey," 271 
Liverpool, Lord, 125 
Lloyd, Bishop, 128, 136, 268 
Lloyd, Mrs. and the Misses, 

129 

Lloyd, Foster, 150 
Lockhart, 62, 65 
Logic Stakes, 326 
Lonsdale, J., 98 
Lonsdale, Miss, 256 
Lothian, Lord, 227 
Louse, " Mother," 290 
Lowe, " Bob," 94, 202 
Lowndes (oarsman), 114 
Lyttelton, Lord, 232, 318 



M 

Macaulay, in, 273 
Macbride, 63, 115, 286, 308 
Maclaren, 108 
Maclean, Donald, 5 
Macmullen (Corpus), 240 
M'Neile, 231 
Maconochie, 134 
Macray, Dr., 164 
Madan (of Bodleian), 12, 310 
Malan, G. C, 95, &c. 



Malmesbury, Lord, 87 

Manning, 86, 88, 169, 170, 180, 

228 

Mansel, Dean, 60, 248, 264 
Marriott, Charles, 95, 133, 152, 

179, 189, &c. 
Marriott, John, sen., 17 
Marriott, John, jun., 190 
Marsham, Dr., 307 
Martyrs' Memorial, 295 
Massey, M. P., 92 
Massie (Uniomachia), 94 
Matthews, Arthur, 302 
Matthews, Colonel, 302 
Matthews, Henry, 13, 302 
Maude (of Queen's), 24 
Maurice, F. D., 89, 195, 222, 

261, &c. 

Maurice, Dr. Peter, 74 
Mayow (Uniomachia), 95 
Menzies, Fletcher, 113 
Menzies (Brasenose), 72 
Merivale, Dean, 86 
Merry, W. W., 310 
Meyrick, F., 227, &c. 
Michell, R., 59 
Microscopic Society, 56 
Mill, J. S., 263 
Millais, 49 
Milton, 258 

Moberly, Dr., 98, 236, 246, 275 
Monro, 52 
Moon (oarsman), 74 
Morris, W., 5, 53 
Morris, "Jack," 151, 243 
Mozley, J., 169, 184 
Mozley, T., 17, 181 
Miiller, Max, 48, 72, 80, 90, 146, 

&c., 202, 203, 276 
Mundella, Rt. Hon., 101 
Mundy (Magdalen porter), 35 
Murray, G. W., 76 
Museum, 46, &c. 



INDEX 



345 



N 



Nares, Dr., 175 

Neate, Charles, 37, 174, 189, 198 

Ness, Charlotte, 14 

Nestor, i, 82, 298 

Neve, Mrs., 7 

Newman, Francis, 180, 185, 204, &c 

Newman, J. H., 2, 17, 71, 100, 116 
135, 142, 163, 179, &c., 190, 
192, 197, 217, 218, 224, 226, 
227, 228, 234, &c., 260, 262, 
275, 287, 289, 322 

Newman, T. H., 166, &c. 

Newman, Mrs., 179, 284 

Nicol, Professor, 133 

Noetics, The, 17, 173 

Norman (of Radley), 281 

Norris, President, 240 



Oakley, Sir H., 51, 77 

Ogle, Dr., 47, 63 

Ogle, Octavius, 167 

Orlebar (Rugby), 197 

Otter (Corpus), 120, 231, 241 

Ouseley, Sir F., 73, 77, 78, 81, 82, 

&c, 148 

Owen, Professor, 37, 52 
Oxford, Bishop of, see Wilberforce 
Oxford Novels, 85, 197 
Oxford Spy, 64, 116 



Palmer, Roundell, 84, 95 
Palmer, William, 84, 181 
Palmerston, Lord, 267 
Parker, Charles, 222 
Parker, Joseph, 17, 292 
Parnell (St. John's), 152 
Parr, Dr., 15, 161 



Parrott (organist), 82 

Parsons, Bishop, 15, 291 

Parsons (Old Bank), 219 

Patterson, Monsignor, 226, &c. 

Pattison, M. J., 295 

Pattison, Mark, 37, 95, 121, 133, 
136, 181, 187, 192, 213, 216, 
223, 228, 252, &c., 295 

Pattison, Dora, 256, 260 

Pearse, Mrs., 7 

Peck water, 129 

Peel, Sir Robert, 117, 125, 183 

Pegge, Sir Christopher, 13, 45, 62, 
299 

Phillips, Professor, 32, 44, 49 

Piozzi, Mrs., 73 

Plato, 87, 156, 214, 275 

Plumer, C. J., 235 

Plummer, Dr., 230, 238 
Plumtre, Dr., 233, and frontispiece 
Pollen, Ilungerford, 50, 52 
Pope, 7, 31, 54, 105, 145, 258 
Powell, see Baden 
Price, Mrs. B., 52 
Prinsep (artist), 52 
Prout (Christchurch), 155 
Pugin, 158 

Pusey, Dr., 36, 134, 136, &c., 151, 
180, 184, 214, 225, 261, 263, 
264, 275, 310 
Pusey, Lady Lucy, 131 
Pusey, Philip, sen., 90, 133, 143 
Pusey, Philip, jun., 138 
Pyne, Louisa, 77 



Quick, Edward, 23 



Radnor, Lord, 183 
Randall, "Tom," 114 



346 



INDEX 



Reade, Charles, 165 

Reid, Wemyss, 84 

Reinagle (musician), 76 

Reynolds (Proctor), 153 

Richards (Exeter), 275 

Richardson (flute player), 76 

Rickards (Oriel), 293 

Riddell, James, 202 

Ridding, Arthur, 112, 230, 240 

Rigaud, John, 26, 163, 166 

Risley, W., 174 

Risley, "Bob," 280 

Robertson, Charles, 16, 64, 154 

Rogers (artist), 53 

Rogers, Thorold, 100, &c., 133, 

188, 219, 247, 255 
Rolleston, Dr., 32, 58, 140 
Rose, Hugh James, 1 36 
Rossetti, 52, 53 
Rothschild, 173 
Routh, Dr., 116, 159, &c., 172 
Routh, Mrs., 30, 159 
Rowden, G., 72 
Royds (oarsman), 113 
Rudd (Oriel), 23 
Ruskin, 33, 52, 98 
Russell, Lord J. f 276 
Rutland, Duke of, 89 



Sadler (confectioner), 292 
Salisbury, Lord, 228 
Sanctuary (Exeter), 129 
Sarratt (chess player), 66 
Sawell, J., 74, 167 
Schlippenbach, Countess, 130 
Scott, Dr., 94, 125, 169, 200, 212, 

fee. 
Scott, Walter, 2, 143, 260, 266, 

291 

Sellon, Miss, 134 
Selwyn (Winchester boy), 1 10 



Senior Fellows, 21 

Septem contra Camum, 113, 306 

Sewell, J. E. (New College), 52, 

170, 177, &c. 

Sewell, R. (Magdalen), 169 
Sewell, W. (Exeter), 49, 274, &c. 
Shaftesbury, Lord, 186 
Shaw, Dr., 125, 126 
Shea, the brothers, 52 
Sheppard, J. W., 310 
Sheppard, " Tommy," 232 
Short, "Tommy," 18, 84, 229, &c. t 

287 
Shuttleworth, Warden, 22, 23, 37, 

147, 168, 275, 309, 316 
Sibthorp (Magdalen), 164 
Sinclair, W., 94 

Singleton (Radley), 278, 279, 280 
Skene, of Rubislaw, 225, 266 
Skey, Dr., 65 
Skidmore, 52, 160 
Slatter (schoolmaster), 286, &c. 
Smith, Cecilia, 123 
Smith, Dean, 123 
Smith, Goldwin, 104, 105, 297 
Smith, Henry, 61 
Smith, Payne, 209 
Smith, Sydney, 17, 18, 47, 193, 292 
Smythe, Miss, 51 
Sneyd, Warden, 309 
Spedding (Cambridge), 86 
Spiers, 249 
Stainer, Sir J., 82 
Stanhope (artist), 52 
Stanley, A. P., 79, 97,98, 121, 182, 

185, 196, 198, 267, 269, 271, 

273 

Stanley, Bishop, 79 
Stanley, Lady, 303 
Stanley, Lord, 79 
Stephen, Fitzjames, 208 
Stephens (angler), 290 
Sterling, J., 86, 262 



INDEX 



347 



Stowe (Oriel), 286 

Streets, names of, 296 

Strong, Captain, 49 

Strong, Professor, 229 

Stzrelecki, Count, 92 

Sunderland (Cambridge), 84 

Swanwick, Anna, 258 

Symons, "Ben," 109, 152, 204, 

and frontispiece 
Symonds, Charles, 297 



Tait, Archbishop, 37, 95, 217 

Talboys, 201, 292 

Tatham, Dr., 147 

Taunton, Lord, 36, 90 

Temple, Archbishop, 105, 212, 

214, 216, &c., 272 
Tennyson, 86, 121, 213, 251, 257, 

264 

Thackeray, 76 
Thalberg, 76 
Theobald, "White," 230 
Thistlethwayte, F., 286 
Thistlethwayte, Mrs., 92 
Thomas (naturalist), 43 
Thomas, Vaughan, 243, &c. 
Thompson (Trinity, Cambridge), 86, 

223, 267 

Thompson (Lincoln), 26, 218, 254 
Thomson, Archbishop, 37, 77, 136, 
265, &c. 

Throgmorton, Sir R., 133 

Thunny, the, 155, 315 

Thursby, Walter, 230 

Ticknor (American), 92 

Todd, Dr., 278 

Tremenheere (New College), 170 

Tripp, H., 278 

Tuckwell, 62, &c., 302 

Tuckwell, Dr., 224 

Tyler (Oriel), 235 



U 
Uniomachia, 93, 200 



V 

Vaughan, Halford, 85, 106, 211 
Venables (curate, St. Paul's), 50 
Victoria, Queen, 2, 5, 241 

W 

Waldegrave, Bishop, 267, 269 

Walker, Professor, 43, 204 

Wall, Dr., 62, 63 

Wall, Henry, 99, 203, &c. 

Wall, Miss, 204 

Ward, Lord, 224 

Ward, W. G., 95, 100, 217, 264 

Warton, T., 162, 224, 283 

Weatherby (Balliol), no 

Wellesley, Dr., 20 

Wellesley, Lord, 248 

Wellington, Duke of, 2, 113, 125, 

133. HI 

West (apothecary), 64, 299 
Westbury, Lord, 198 
West wood, Professor, 20, 58, &c. 
Whately, Archbishop, 17, 37, 121, 

1 68 

Whewell, Dr., 223 
White, see Blanco 
Whorwood (Magdalen), 166, &c. 
Whorwood, Madame, 166 
Wilberforce, R., 186 
Wilberforce, Samuel, 50, 53, 54i 

154, 172, 199, 267, 314, 320 
Wilkins, Harry, 35, no, 117 
Williams (botanical professor), 32, 

289 

Williams, Henry, 174 
Williams, Isaac, 180, 181, 224, &c., 

287, 292 



INDEX 



Williams, Miss, 244 

Williams, Warden, 73, 164, 177 

Wilson (Moral Philosophy), 188 

Wilson, R. F., 189 

Wingfield, Mrs. (Oxford), 236 

Wingfield, Mrs. (Tickencote), 68 

Wintle (St. John's), 307 

Wirion, General, 173 

Wolff, Joseph, 243 

Wood, Anthony, 163 

Wood (apothecary), 64 

Wood, J. G., 46, 107 

Woodward, 51, &c. 

Wooll, Dr., 231 

Wootten, Dr., 29, 45 



Wootten (mayor), 4 

Wordsworth, Charles, 85, 87, &c., 

248, 304, 35 
Wordsworth, Mrs., 87 
Wordsworth, William, 222, 252, 

258 

Wormald (oarsman), 1 1 1 
Wren, Walter, 1 1 1 , &c. 
Wyatt, James, 49, 292, 307 
Wynter, Dr., 151 



Yonge, Miss, 142 
Young, G., 1 6 



THE END 



Printed by BALI.ANTYNE, HANSON & Co 
Edinburgh &> London 



HOME USE 

CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT 
MAIN LIBRARY 

This book is due on the last date stamped below. 
1 -month loans may be renewed by calling 642-3405. 
6-month loans may be recharged by bringing books 

to Circulation Desk. 
Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days prior 

to due date. 

ALL BOOKS ARE SUBJECT TO RECALL 7 DAYS 
AFTER DATE CHECKED OUT. 



BCD QfcC UCf I 



SEP 



JAN 2 2 1980 



ITERLIBRARY LOAN 





RECj 



LD21 A-40t-5,'74 
(R8191L) 



General Library 

University of California 

Berkeley 



YC 22889 



RETURN TO the circulation desk of any 

University of California Library 

or to the 

NORTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
Bldg. 400, Richmond Field Station 
University of California 
Richmond, CA 94804-4698 

ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 
2-month loans may be renewed by calling 

(510)642-6753 
1-year loans may be recharged by bringing books 

to NRLF 
Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days 

prior to due date 

DUE AS STAMPED BELOW
Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "Reminiscences of Oxford"

See other formats
